Daily look for the following within you. Then, playfully explore the suggestions:

1. A desire to slow down
(This is your True Self; listen to it.)

2. A yearning to be quiet
(Rest inward and let your awareness move toward the quiet; you can do this—trust your inner ability to go toward the right place.)

3. Wanting more sleep
(It’s natural to sleep more in the winter; enjoy healing your body and being.)

4. Wanting more time for yourself
(You will find the time if you give up your excuses.)

5. Less interest in the world around you
(Take a break from what’s not necessary; question what you believe is “necessary.”)

6. Less drive
(It’s OK to do less for a while; your world will not fall apart. As you recognize your inner quiet as part of who you are, you will naturally learn how to get more done with less effort.)

7. A simple happiness that is not based on anything in particular
(It’s in you. Notice, however, that it can be obscured by excessive thoughts or emotions. Choose to awaken this happiness; it is found within your Heart Presence.)

You can use the above as a daily practice. The more time you give it, the greater and more permanent the rewards.

Jeff Krock is dedicated to helping people thrive in the 21st Century. You can find him at JeffKrock.com.

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Photo credits:
Snow scene, Doe Lea valley by foto footprints

He wants to be a bad-ass member of the Axe Gang, the most feared gang around, but he’s not mean enough, scary enough, or strong enough to pull it off. 

All of his plans to impress the Gang Boss backfire, his partner in crime is prone to falling asleep, and he’s haunted by a humiliating bullying incident from his childhood.

I feel for the guy. Not that he didn’t get to be in the gang, but that he didn’t know how to get what he wanted. 

Which is as perfect a segue as I’m going to get for the admission that I’ve been feeling like I don’t know how to get where I want to go with my business.  

Destination Unclear

Several months ago I decided it was time to shift my business model online.

Theoretically, it oughta be easy enough:
Define vision + set goals + make plan + execute plan = Success!

Practically, I got lost somewhere around define vision. You see, I very quickly found myself wandering around the Lands O’ I-have-no-idea-what-it-actually-entails which was then confounded by I-don’t-know-what-I-don’t-know. Confusing, you know? 

So it’s been a period of coming back to the basics: clarifying purpose, defining niche, experimenting and getting educated–hence classes, podcasts, interviews, workshops, blogs, reading, listening, watching. 

Destination Clear… or is it?

In Kung Fu Hustle, our wanna-be bad guy keeps trying different schemes to get accepted into the gang, until after one last humiliation, he gives up.

Which is, of course, when two bad-guy goons show up and take him to the boss. He’s given an almost impossible task and, somehow, he slides through that sliver of “almost” and earns his place in the gang. 

The problem is, he’s out of place in the gang. You could say that he made progress but, was it in the right direction?

Destination Kinda Clear

I know I’m going in the right direction, that much I’m clear on. It’s just that in the deluge of new incoming information, the direction has lacked context, which pretty much leaves me feeling lost. 

It’s a little Kafka-esque. You show up for a meeting and there’s a sign on the door saying the meeting has been moved. You go to the new location and there’s a sign on the door, again saying that the meeting has been moved. You go to the next new location and it’s the same thing. You keep thinking you’re at the right place but finally realize you don’t know what’s going on. That’s been me. 

[A few side notes:

1. I feel like I'm really out on a limb here because people seem to assume that since I'm "The Organizer" I must have all my s#@t together. Welcome to being human.
2. Another confession: I don't have a coach. (This should elicit a gasp of horror.)
3. I've shared this little tidbit before: one of my clients several years ago interviewed over 100 6-figure solopreneurs to see if there were similarities among them. There was. Each and every one worked with a coach. Is it ego? Is it being cheap? Why in the world do I think this wouldn't apply to me? Anywho.
4. I fibbed just a little when I wrote "don't have a coach". I almost have a coach--my first appointment is on Thursday.

/side note]

Destination… screw it, just have a good time

Let’s face it. Sometimes we don’t know where we’re going, and that’s OK. Not only that, it can be FUN.

Honestly, once I get past the self-inflicted disappointment of not having a new marketing engine in place, several products completed and linked up with auto responders and shopping cart, and a couple of collaborations under my belt, I admit that this process has been a blast.

I’m learning about a whole new world out there filled with awesome people doing fantastic work. It’s full of integrity, people showing up to help, and folks looking to build community.

Where are you right now? 

Conveniently we find ourselves at the end of the year, i.e. the perfect time to take stock of your current situation. Hopefully your year has been more fluid than mine, though I hear it’s been quite the challenge for many. 

Wherever you are and whatever phase of your business you’re in, you’re in the perfect place for you and that’s completely awesome!

If, for whatever reason, you don’t share the enthusiasm, let’s make sure that your expectations are in line with your status. Because if there’s one other thing I am completely convinced of, it’s that:

 The Era of Struggle is Over.
(Remember that you heard it here first, folks.

With that in mind, do you need to get some reality check action on any of the following?

1. Easify production expectations. If you’re in the process of reinventing yourself or in a major educational phase for your business, give yourself a chance to learn the lay of the land and assimilate what you’re learning. 
2. Be honest with yourself. Is it time to get help? Don’t be like the dork above (oh, that was me) insisting that you can go it all alone. Get the clear eyes of someone who’s gone before you. 
3. Ask good questions. As silly as this one sounds, it’s powerful. Asking a specific question pushes you to drill down to the real issue at hand. For example, Instead of asking “What should I do next?” ask,”What is the best next step for getting clarity on my niche?” Then be patient, the answer may need to percolate while you sleep and then show up the next day.

I know this is the time of year that we typically talk about goals and goal setting, and let me tell you, I’ve been researching some fascinating stuff on the subject that you may not have heard before. I look forward to sharing this stuff with you soon. Real soon. 

For now, you can tip toe through Lance’s musing on goal completion in his column below in The Not-So-Simple Life.

Destination Wildly Fantastic Success

You’re probably wondering what happened with the hero of Kung Fu Hustle (of course you knew he’d be the hero). 

(SPOILER ALERT!!) Well, he got beaten to a pulp which, instead of killing him, unleashed his chi and thereby allowed him to become a kung fu master in the style of the House of the Palm of God as he was destined to be.

I personally am opting for the metaphorical beating which, as far as I’m concerned has been fulfilled in this past year of struggle through epic attempts to run through water.

2012 is the Chinese Year of the Dragon, a symbol of good fortune and sign of intense power. For ALL of us. 

Are ready for your chi to be unleashed?

We drink in the confident energy of the woman on stage, beaming face helping us feel seen. We obediently filled out the worksheets in the guidebook. We play along with the dancing at the end of each break. Life in the Banquet Hall can get pretty surreal…

On the second morning, we’re ready for a breakthrough of some sort.

She’s encourages us to expand. We do an exercise to identify what’s keeping us small and preventing us from believing in the value of our services.

It’s a touchy subject. From one perspective, you could say this is the real reason we’re all there. A fear of claiming the value of what we give our clients. It was mine, in any case.

She walks us through the steps that get me to quickly identify an experience from 6th grade that has quietly held me prisoner for the last 30 years. (Am I really going to write this?!? Crikety.) Ok, here goes.

The Incident.

In the 6th grade I started wearing a training bra. It really was just for practice because there was nothing there. It was awkward, embarrassing. I was sure everyone would notice.

It doesn’t sound like that big of a deal, but please understand that I was painfully shy and terribly insecure then. I was the youngest and smallest kid in the class. Always the last one picked for kickball. I had changed schools in 4th grade and had never found my place in my new class. I ate lunch by myself every day. That was me.

So during recess, another girl in class saw one of the straps peaking out from under my shirt on my shoulder. This girl wore a real bra, no training variety necessary for her. She was totally comfortable with it—it was no big deal.

I clearly remember her towering over me. With a big smile and maternal pride on her face she said, “You’re growing up!” and she reached over to tuck the strap back under my shirt.

I was M-O-R-T-I-F-I-E-D.

Not only did someone see my training bra strap, she called attention to it. Deer caught in headlights—Wham! I shrunk into the smallest hole I could possibly find. My worst self-conscious fear had been realized. I was ready to die right there on the spot.

A part of me has been arrested in that moment for the last 30 years. Irrational? Entirely. Impactful? OMG.

There, in the Banquet Room of the Holiday Inn, images start flying across the screen of my mind. 30 years worth of experiences contorted to protect this humiliated little girl.

The problem with being small.

Simple. When we play small, we cannot realize our full potential.

I know this because when I feel small, it physically hurts. It shows up as a constriction in my chest area. My shoulders pull forward in a little hunch of protection. There’s a tightness in my throat—representing the desperate desire to sing my song loudly and beautifully to the world! Instead, I’m squeaking out some pathetic noises under my breath.

Signs point to the reality that I’m good at what I do. In fact, I know I’m good. BUT that immature part of me insists that I’m not yet ready, my stuff isn’t developed enough. Therefore, people won’t find it helpful. They’ll skim through it, discard it, and feel like it was a waste of money.

This voice keeps me small (surprise!) It prevents me from setting a date for the online version of my program. It prevents me from even working on converting it to its new form. I move at a snail’s pace.

Every day I hang back, my gifts stay with me. My arms are tired of carrying them. The bountiful baskets in my imagination aren’t so pretty anymore. The fruit is rotting, the cheese is molding, the bread is getting stale. Everyone who would benefit from my bounty is denied.

It is so ridiculously and tragically ironic. The flame of my passion to help people work differently burns—yah, burns and scars my hands rather than lighting the sacred cauldron in the Temple of my Purpose, blazing strong and bright as a beacon to others.

Tools to let that crap go.

The beauty of that kind of childhood trauma is that, once dealt with, it becomes a deep pool of goodness to share with others—empathy, compassion, understanding, a different point of view.

How to let it go? Here are the steps I followed. And wow, did I feel relieved once I had done this! These are a combination of steps from the class I took with Vrinda and my work with Dr. Don.

1. Identify the situation.
2. Forgive any other people involved.
3. Forgive myself for reacting in the way I did.
4. Identify the lessons learned, and/or
5. Identify the gifts received from the whole situation.
6. Wish the other people involved well and then imagine them walking away.
7. Come up with a replacement phrase/vision to neutralize the old memories.

A few final thoughts on the replacement phrase: I use mine whenever that sneaky, habitual Gremlin attempts to creep in and sabotage my work. It helps me stand tall, in my skin, and courageous enough to proceed in the face of lurking insecurity.

The world does not benefit from your playing small.

What’s YOUR training bra incident? How is it holding you back (no pun intended)? Maybe it’s time to stop being victimized by it?

Be Big
Be BOLD.
BE DELICIOUS!

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Photo credits:
Bra by saturn ♄

Have you ever made a decision that you regretted almost immediately? I’ll venture to guess that anxiety had seized your senses and convinced you of all kinds of terrible possibilities if you didn’t act immediately.

Anxiety lives in the mind and wreaks havoc with the body.

Honest fear is a legitimate response to a potentially dangerous situation.

Anxiety, on the other hand, is an irrational response to a potential scenario that could be avoidable if you were able to be your awesome self (being the resourceful, flexible human being that you are.)

How can you be your awesome self and make healthy decisions when anxiety is trying to hijack your mind? By evicting that trouble-maker, of course!

1) Shake anxiety out of your body. 

Literally! Anxiety and stress create a chemical hormone called Cortisol. One of the quickest and most immediate ways to use up the Cortisol in your body is aerobic exercise.

Don’t have time for a hardcore bike ride or run? Do a full body shake—shake your legs, your feet, your hands, your arms, your torso, your head–as much at the same time as possible. Do it for at least a full minute, several if you can stand it.

Sounds silly (OK, looks kind of silly, too) but don’t knock it ’til you’ve tried it.

2) Fill your mind with deliciousness.

Anxiety is like a mouse that slips through a teeny-tiny crack into the empty space between walls. Once in that space, she makes herself at home, builds a nest, and reproduces.

Your job: fill up the space (your mind) so the mouse (anxiety) can’t get in.

Here’s how to fill your mind with deliciousness:

Focus on action. Identify the very next ONE (and only one) thing that needs doing. Get your mind to focus on that one thing and do it.

This fills up a good portion of your mind but not all of it, so then add:

Awareness of your body. While you are focusing on what you are doing, place a portion of your awareness on how your body feels. It’s kind of like your peripheral vision—you sense it’s there but it’s not front and center.

Monitor for tight shoulders, clenched jaw, and shallow breathing. Release any tension as soon as you feel it. Treat your body like a best friend.

3) Good clean living.

Rest, good nourishment, regular exercise, and spiritual practice go a long way in maintaining your good health and judgement. I’m giving minimal attention to this because I know you already know it, but it’s always good to be reminded.

Keep anxiety out of the equation and avoid the pain and hassle of cleaning up after short-sighted decisions. Hello, Awesome You!

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Photo credit:
Dance! by Clearly Ambiguous

The last time I was there, she just stopped, looked me dead in the eye and said, “There’s something wrong with this picture. Other people can do this. Why can’t I?”

Her pain was heartbreaking. Unfortunately, a clear desk, a ToDo list, and some time management do not equal peace of mind. Simplifying is about so much more than this.

It’s emotional. It challenges strongly engrained habits and responses. It digs up old baggage. It brings us face to face with our unrealistic expectations. It tests our relationships and communication skills. Let’s just say, it’s not all that easy for a lot of people.

I put this mind map together for her. It represents a combination of factors that she’ll be working on, for ex. Time Management, Systems, etc.

We then listed one easy habit for each of these factors.

My intent was to give her

1. a visual understanding of how complex the situation is. She’s incredibly hard on herself and will benefit from lightening up and having patience.
2. something she can refer to on a daily basis that reminds her of very simple actions she can make.

The fascinating phenomenon is that the smaller the steps are, the more powerful the mind map will be. In fact, the bigger a step is, the less likely you are to do it, which makes it about as helpful as an unused gym membership.

Success comes from repetition, not the size of step.

Each step, action or thought by itself seems almost meaningless, like a crumb, but aggregated over time, they result in an entire chocolate cake. Well, that’s more like reverse engineering, but you get the idea.
My suggestion for you is this:

1. Make your own simple mind map reflecting your challenge areas.
2. Write down a single, easy-peasy thing you can do to support yourself in each area. Let it be easy!!
3. Pick one easy-peasy thing to work on for the week.
4. Do it. A lot.

TIP: If possible, tie it to something that happens irregardless. For ex. if the goal is to relax and breathe deeply throughout the day, then every time you’re about to reach for the phone, pause first (whether to answer or make a call). Sit still, relax your shoulders, draw a breath all the way down to your feet, and smile. Then pick up the phone.

My client desires a lifestyle in which she is joyful and present with her family, on top of her projects, and happy with the level of organization in her home and office. What’s your goal?

You look around to see if anyone just happened to have a recording device pointed in your direction because that was just too sweet…

I had one of those conversations today while having coffee with a lovely woman who is growing her social media assistance business here in our tiny town of Nevada City.

Because conversations with me tend to come round to the idea of simplifying (go figure!) we started talking about her workflow.

She said she was getting frazzled working for a bunch of different clients simultaneously.

Due to the nature of social media and the way her brain works, she knows that designating, for example, one hour to this client and then another hour to that client just isn’t practical. She’s bouncing all over the place, following threads of ideas and links to new things—which is great—but she’s finding it isn’t mentally sustainable.

I explained how each type of activity utilizes a different set of operating instructions. We run through them so fast and so automatically that we don’t even realize it.

When you pick up your cappuccino you’re running instructions on how to bring it to your mouth without spilling, assess whether the temperature is OK, and then set it back on the saucer. Not something we think about blow by blow, but it happens nonetheless.

Mono-tasking is what we typically call having only one set of operating instructions running. When you continue until you finish that one list of instructions, you get the delicious pleasure of completion satisfaction.

When you have several sets of instructions running—say you start one list, get part way through it, then open up another list and then another, even though you only literally work on one thing at a time, for example a tweet for client X or a Facebook post for client Q, you still have all those other unfinished lists open.

Your mind is expending energy to maintain them because they haven’t been completed or closed.

The more you have open, the more likely you are to hit frazzle mode. At what point does this happen? Depends. Everyone’s threshold is different, and you can mix different types of activities to varying levels of success.

Compounding her frazzling tendency, she’s been on an hourly model. This leads to an unsettled mental spin of “How do I track time when I’m constantly jumping around” and “It’s-Never-Done”—the combination of which leads to, most likely, a bunch of un-billed time and super long hours.

So how can she reframe her work to get more peace and completion (like you get mono-tasking) while still playing to the reality of social media jumping around for multiple clients?

There are (at least) a few things that she can experiment with:

1. By paying attention to when she starts getting frazzled, she can see where tinkering would be helpful. For example, are too many or too disparate operating instructions running?
2. Transition from an hourly model to a package or retainer model.
3. Define what the specific and realistic goals are for each client each day, aka Know When You’re Done!
4. Instead of grouping by Client, group by social media venue, or even activity within a venue. For example, she could focus on responding to others’ tweets OR posting clients’ tweets (and not both at the same time).

After writing that last sentence, I see that if you aren’t a Twitter person, you’ll have no idea what that means. The point is to narrow down the scope of what you’re working on while maintaining the flexibility and spontaneity demanded by the task and/or your attention span.

Ok, let’s wrap ‘er up. What I particularly want you to take from this is the knowledge that you can make changes in your workflow that point you toward the benefits of mono-tasking without shunning multi-tasking.

We’re not living in a dualistic mono-multi world, no siree, there are many m’s in between. It’s our challenge to find them!

Let it be easy.

Creatives, entrepreneurial types and thought leaders tend to have a plethora of brilliant ideas inspired by others’ websites, articles, offerings, images, blog categories, and so on.

Let’s be realistic. Ideas are not all created equal. Some are good, some are lame, some are beautifully and wonderfully inspired and some are merely stepping stones to other, more useful ideas.

Life is fluid, it moves quickly. Ideas get stale quickly. This year’s income should be 6 figures, not your website bookmark list.

Two problems with the epic bookmark list are:

1. lack of useful organization, and
2. sites saved without knowing how they might remotely be useful in the future.

In other words, too much noise and you tune out—the good and the bad. Discernment is a necessary proposition when faced with, what’s essentially, infinite potential.

Enter mindfulness—a useful tool in oh-so many ways.

MindLESS wandering (passively taking in images and words) around the internet = waste of time.
MindFUL wandering (retaining an awareness of You and what you are about) can result in discovery of resources and connections relevant to your endeavors.

(Mindfulness is also useful in knowing when it’s time to stop meandering the electronic topography.)

For the most part, we want to think in terms of catch and release: Appreciate the cool website you found and release it back to the deep, dark depths of the world wide web secure in the knowledge that you’ve gleaned what you were meant to have gleaned.

At the same time, when a resource for your business or info for an article you’re working on crosses your path, you want to capture it.

Time to get practical. There are beaucoup methods for storing useful info. Due to the nature of most research these day, i.e. online, I use Evernote.

I appreciate its platform flexibility: Mac, PC, online-based, Android, Blackberry, iGadgets (iPhone, iPad).

Share-ability: Your assistant can add research to it, you can share a list with a partner.

Cost: Nada. Love it.

Then there are close to a gazillion plug-in functionalities that I won’t even pretend that I’ve scratched the surface on.
Disclaimer: I typically ignore plug-ins because bells and whistles often are fun but become often time sucks. I’m zeroing in on organizing info that will benefit your business and projects.

OK, enough said here. If you haven’t created your Evernote account, go do it here. Play around with it a little and then come back for the next post on the subject: Specific ways to maximize use of Evernote to organize lists for your small business.

For details on organizing in Evernote, see:

• Get the Simplified Version of Evernote, and
• Specific ways to maximize use of Evernote to organize lists for your small business.

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Photo credits:
Web Activity Flower Graph by saintbob

Not for my household trash. Waste Management, Inc already does that.

I want someone (something?) to come take all the crap out of my head on a regular basis. This crap consists of:

• chatterbrain tendencies that fill my head with noise.for example: The constant commentary telling me things like I’m looking at a chair with nine holes in its back which is the same style I used to have but in white and it’s not all that comfortable but how much is from Ikea and by the way I don’t remember if it’s stackable, but I do know that it reminds me of the unnamed person who I got the chairs with and shit I just thought of her again. OMG. Who. Bloody, Cares?!?!? As if mental calm, peace and quiet were some terrible, horrible disease to be avoided at all costs.
• compelling urges that trick me into reading useless informationfor example: Reading the back of Mark’s “green apple shampoo” container in the shower. Really? You want me to compare this weird chemical smell to green apples? Why not red apples? or fuji apples? Why do these cheap shampoo companies insist on abusing fruit in this way? Is that neon green color helping hair? Why did I read it AGAIN??
• victim thoughts that get me unfairly comparing myself to role models and that demands unnatural feats of completionfor example: Getting down on myself for not being able to finish my video course project. Yeah, who cares that it’s actually a huge project traversing all kinds of unknown (for me) territory on a shoestring budget. It should’ve been done already, like two years ago at least, damn it!

I could go on—I know that lists of 10 are always popular, even though oftentimes the author really only has eight or nine and thus tries to hide a couple of slackers in around numbers 5 and 6—but we’ll hold it to three and get on with it already.

Am I alone in being so incredibly disgusted with this crap? I’m seriously distressed and frustrated by it.

It shapes my perspective into an incredibly boring, predictable and pathetic experience that makes me want to cry or go crazy which is then magnified exponentially at the thought of living with this inane story for the next 40 years. (A frustration which is, of course, disturbingly ironic.)

It makes me want to re-enact a scene from a movie I saw some 15 years ago, Pi (I’m pretty sure this was it). I don’t remember much anything of the storyline or the main character’s motivation. All I recall from the movie, actually, is a single image (I closed my eyes for the scene) of the main dude taking a drill to his head. I think he wanted to stop the voices. Which is how I feel when flooded by above crap. But I’m not going to hurt myself.

It’s about this point (or several paragraphs previous) that this post should turn into 10 Ways to Turn the Mental Crap Off. I’ll write down the ideas I have on the subject, count them, and then name the list appropriately, even if it ends up being something odd like four.

1. Meditation, a long-term solution. As a still-novice sitter, it’s too long to be super helpful in intensely rough patches of mental hijacking as the disturbed mind will make mincemeat out of the deep, calm pools I’m attempting to return to. It still is worth keeping with as a daily practice as all of those 20 minute sessions do wield some influence over the unwieldy mind.
2. Altruistic acts, a medium-term solution. Definitely a challenge to get this one going as the above condition is decidedly 100% self-serving, self-indulgent and completely lacking in discipline. It’s been shown that people who suffer from depression are relieved of symptoms when they serve others.
3. Routine, a short-term solution. This one’s power lies in switching gears or throwing a wrench in the pattern—your choice of metaphor. It helps stop the downward spiral of the self-indulgent environment that mind-hijacking thrives in by getting your mind onto another train of pattern. The power of repetition is that you have another pattern to resort to—your only job here is to make sure the substitute pattern is taking you in the right direction.

That’s all I got today. Three, not 10 Ways to reign in the mind and get it to observe some moderately acceptable social manners.

PHOTO CREDITS

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Photo credits:
When is trash pick-up? by 4nitsirk

Photo credits:
Let me out by David Chartier

Photo credits:
Tracks by Chang’r

“Whoa there, Nellie,” I cautioned. “We need to set the stage first, identify some context, explore the parameters of the endeavor, cool?”

So I started with a vision board, image here in the post.

The process

I quickly looked through magazines (three or four Inc. and Fast Co. magazines plus one Toastmasters magazine) and tore out images and words that caught my eye. Wanting to feel the paper and not metal, I didn’t use scissors, just fingers to tear and tape to attach.

Once I had a good number of tear outs, I did another pass to pull out any that didn’t really want to be there, then started taping. There were four images that I wanted to make sure were on top, so I set those aside to put on last.

The result

Considering the limited magazine sources, I’m pretty stoked with how it came out. It’s relatively small so will be easy to make space for on the wall, it’s colorful and has a nice combo of words, images and people.

The next step is to write about it.  I want to consciously understand what it represents, which will give more depth and power when glancing at in the future.

Taking some time to decipher it now will also make it easier to communicate to others. I probably won’t describe the vision board per se to other people (besides here!) but I may come up with some insights into this next phase that the board represents, i.e. the eCourse creation phase of Project Simplify, that’d I’d like to be able to articulate well.

The deciphering

Starting with the items that wanted to be in the forefront:

Living your values - That’s what this business is all about! Great reminder to stay connected with this intention of honoring my own values while helping others live in integrity with themselves.

Organizing principles - The means, baby, the means. This is what we don’t get in our education at school. Not having these as part of our foundation is what slams us daily, makes us feel ineffective and stressed out.

I also feel really strongly about helping people understand the principles rather than just the How To. The How To is useful in particular situations, while internalizing the principles means that you can apply them in all kinds of situations.

So we want to cover the principles as well as the How To, which is represented by the “How do you” image in the lower left.

The image of a bunch of people around table – I’d like to see people do these eCourses with others—friends, colleagues, co-workers. It’s sooo easy to let stuff slide when it’s just you, your computer, and a big ole To Do list. When you have others for accountability, support and sharing ideas, it’s so much more lively and doable!

My last workshop group didn’t want to stop at our 6 weeks. They wanted to keep meeting because they felt the strength, camaraderie and power of the group.

The words, “They did it” (above the “How do you”) represents the success these folks will have in learning and applying the work. And therefore, they are accomplishing their goals and intentions!

The image of the flower/globe – I love this image of dual awareness: staying connected with the exquisite detail and harmony of nature while remaining aware of how our actions affect everything and everyone on the planet. The eCourses must get into nitty gritty detail while staying attuned to the needs of the participants. In other words, it needs to have immense value, be entertaining, and respect your valuable time.

The disco ball – Have fun, dance much, and get groovy =)

Woman with the tats holding the cupcake (she was featured for her successful business selling vegan cupcakes in D.C.) – savvy, edgy, true to her values, not trying to please everyone—focused on making a great product.

Woman with airplanes reflected in her glasses – Travel! Get the word out! Meet with people all over to share my work.

Woman with the binoculars with flag that says “Go Team” – Dual meaning. The first being that creating these courses is to be a team effort—I don’t have to do it all on my own (Phew!!). Second, the teams of people working through these courses together. In both cases, we get to help, support and be encouraged by each other.

Now is the time to reinvent yourself – Interesting one this. I read it as encouragement to embrace this new phase of my career as a trainer and course developer (rather than organizer/workshop leader).

Wrapping up…

There’s a bit more on the board, but I think that’s enough for now.

This is the first public manifestation of the project and I love it!

What feels different now than the (same but daunting) project that I was facing last week is the excitement. Instead of approaching it from a perspective of To Do List, my mind is wandering around the fields of creativity—so much more delicious!

It was a classic case of Left brain jumping in too soon: “eCourse? Did you say eCourse? I can figure that out for you. No problem. I’ve never done that before per se, but I can figure it out. OK, let’s figure out the next step, don’t want to get overwhelmed with too many To Dos all at once! Open up Things and let’s get going!”

What a sneaky punk. Can’t say that Left brain doesn’t listen. He knows to break projects into small-sized pieces. He knows to identify the single next action. What he doesn’t know is where he’s going!!! Start a major endeavor in the task manager? Sheesh.

The goal of “eCourse done by July 31″ is not enough. Approaching it from a product-to-be-developed slant doesn’t give me, a natural professional, enough context.

Dedicated to creating the life I want to live, being wildly successful, and helping people simplify in ways they didn’t think possible requires a whole-istic approach. It’ll take liberties with all the fun and geeky ideas I’ve dreamt of putting onto video. I want people to have fun learning and I want to have fun doing it.

• What’s it feel like?
• What’s the vibe of it?
• Who’s it for?
• Who do I want to work with?
• What’s the scope?
• How deep do I want to go with the subject matter?

In short, what kind of experience do I want to have and do I want my people to have? This is what will set the navigation destination.

Once this is clarified—and I’ll probably make a vision board of some sort for a quick and fun visual reminder—then, and only then, will I invite Lefty to take more control.

Will he be bummed at being asked to step aside for now? Nope. Lefty ego did accept his new job description, after all =) The first item on his list of jobs is:

• Support Shawn’s visions and subsequent goals for realizing them. Wait for representation of vision before acting.

Once the vision is established, we’ll switch to the how. That’s when the To Do list, regular check-ins, time management and all those helpful productivity tools will be oh-so-handy.

So onwards, inwards, upwards, outwards, funwards, homewards—let’s roll!