Big update on the off-site office—I’m finally moved in! Yay! There are a few more large items to relocate: a large desk out of the office and a loveseat sofa in. But functionally, we are up and running. It’s been several years since I’ve had an office outside the house. I’m still working from home occasionally (thanks to the convenience of the laptop) and am still configuring the logistics of two places—hmm, that’d make a good newsletter subject: the dual office info-transfer conundrum. I’d love to hear what works for you. Send your thoughts here.

The Keep Smiling item, Animator vs Animation, is quite impressive. Not only must it have taken quite some time to conceive of and produce, it brings (what for me is) a tough concept to life, namely, a creator wrestling with his creation. Our interview this week with Nancy Shanteau, illustrates another kind of creator/creation struggle: the kind that occurs when you are designing your life. One look at her smiling face is enough to see who won that one!

Lance digs up some pretty awesome In the News Items. The second article title in this issue caught my eye immediately, “Gratitude and abundance…” two words I’m always happy to see in our newsletter! In that article is an image courtesy of Gratefulness.org which offers eCards with beautiful (not cheesy) images to send for special occasions. It’s not too late to send one to me—it is my birthday month, after all. Just kidding. Kind of.

Enjoy,

Shawn Tuttle
Head Simplifier, Project Simplify
Co-editor, The Simplifier

"It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.”

-W.E. Henley

By Shawn Tuttle

Nancy Shanteau and I met at the Wild Mountain Yoga Studio several years ago. She is quick to smile and has an infectious laugh. Upon learning that she was a writing coach, a yoga teacher, and a jewelry maker, I knew she was a woman who had figured out how to follow her heart. I then learned that she had a corporate background which seemed totally incongruous with her current life.

Going from big business to solopreneurship, Nancy has created a life that she absolutely loves. Understanding that following your heart can be simultaneously empowering and crazy scary, learning to read the signs in your life can make the difference between floundering and docking safely on a new shore. My intention in this interview was to explore her transition between two successful worlds.

Our full conversation was at times loose and informal; I’ve tightened it up a bit for your reading pleasure. The full version, in MP3 format, can be heard here.

Nancy Shanteau
—-

ST: Will you share a bit about where you came from and what you’ve been doing since you moved to Nevada County?

Nancy Shanteau: I worked for ten years in a medical biotech device company doing information technology, project management, and  business analysis and support. Lots of different hats but they mostly involved computers and the computer-people interface. Also, application development–trying to get new applications and technology available for people who didn’t necessarily really understand computers or what they could do for them. I’ve always been a translator.

I think I still do that. I translate the writing process for people. I help them understand how what they have in their head can translate onto the paper, it can translate to a readership, can translate to a process.

ST: When did you decide to go solo?

Shanteau: That decision was a little bit made for me. After about 10 years in industry, there were some big structural changes in my environment. We went from all these small applications to putting in these big enterprise applications. In order to go through the two or three year cycle everybody had to be told “no” for a while. I had a really hard time with that. People’s needs weren’t being met and I thought, “Why can’t we meet people’s needs and do the big project?” So I was running into all kinds of conflict. I went to get training on that and that’s how I ended up in a coaching environment.

I got trained at the Strozzi Institute as a Somatic Coach. I took all the courses and then thought, “I almost have a coaching certificate so I’ll just finish it.” I thought I was going to stay as manager of sales operations and keep doing what I was doing. What ended up happening instead was that I had negotiated telecommuting and part time so I could work up here, and they laid me off—right as I got my coaching certificate. It was one of those universal moments that was a little kick in the pants.

ST: Because you weren’t taking action yourself?

Shanteau: I wasn’t committing to being a coach and going solo, though I was actually doing it—during that time I had 10 clients—

ST: But you hadn’t hung the shingle out.

Shanteau:  I kind of had, but I was very half-way. I was standing on the threshold with one foot in each world.  When I got laid off I had really great support. I’d started seeing a Skills for Change coach, and she helped me figure out how to become a solo operator. She helped me set up plans for both directions, if I was going to do it and if I wasn’t  and how I would know if I was being successful. I really did a lot of the homework. I didn’t just make a call of the heart and go into it blind. I ran all kinds of numbers and did business plans.

ST: Is that something that you already knew how to do?

Shanteau:  I think my 10 years in industry really helped me. I knew how to do a projection and I knew how to figure out component elements and put them on a spreadsheet. That stuff didn’t feel alien to me and I know it can be alienating. [The coach] also helped me put some structure around the decision-making. I was very emotional at that time. It was really scary. I had been an employee for such a  long time and successful. There was a lot of identity tied up in that.

If I’d have known how much I was going to love it when I was young, I totally would have wanted to line myself up to do this. I didn’t have models in my family who were entrepreneurial. Not one. They didn’t know how to do it.

ST: Since you didn’t have the models, and since you learned a lot of the business sense through your job, how would you have done it differently if you had known you’d want to be an entrepreneur?

Shanteau: I didn’t know what I was going to become an entrepreneur in until I was doing the coaching certificate. I had looked at being an editor or being a freelance writer, and had decided I didn’t want to do that. It was too isolated. So until I found writing coach, I don’t think I was ready.  I don’t know if I could have done it any earlier because that alchemy needed to happen—where I was putting writing together with a social activity.

ST: Your love for your work clearly comes through in your personality, your attitude. Every time I see you you’re positive and have a great “go out there and kick butt, girl” kind of attitude.

Shanteau: Yeah, I really try to encourage everybody to do what they love.

ST: Tell me more about the transition process and the combination of following your heart  and looking at the decision-making process, the projections and those kind of nuts and bolts aspects—what is your experience of following your heart?

Shanteau: I feel like the intuition was knocking on my door much earlier than I put the pragmatic nuts and bolts in place. There were places where people were saying, “Why aren’t you making a commitment to being a coach?” and “You look like you’d be really good at this” and “It seems like people are really attracted to you”. I was reluctant in answering the call. It was really knocking on my door for a while before I stepped in and said yes.

I had a lot of evidence–I had clients in my practice already, I had a lot of support and people saying “yes” to me.  I both get regular coaching clients and writing clients. I love both—I get to wear two different kinds of hats. I love writing because we end up with a product, something original that never existed before it gets created. And I love coaching with people because people love their lives. They fall in love with themselves and what they are doing, and get a feeling of peace and centeredness in their life.   
—

Shawn Tuttle is founder of Project Simplify.

by Shawn Tuttle

Before pushing the “Play” button on your answering machine or calling to check voice messages, what do you reach for? Pen? Message pad? An envelope from the recycle bin? How many times has a message sat there for a week or two getting listened to repeatedly or skipped over again and again?

Try this time saver: with the goal of listening to each voice message once and then deleting it, check messages with your suite of day-planning tools at hand (address book, schedule, ToDo list, etc.). No more scraps of paper, no more “8 saved messages”. Get the info off the message and to where it belongs tout de suite!

Compiled by Lance Brown

Off the Grid (Culture 11)
URL: http://tinyurl.com/6fxe26
”A family of four tries to use only the electricity they can produce themselves for a whole month.”

Gratitude and abundance: two sides of the same coin (San Francisco Examiner)
URL: http://tinyurl.com/6gm2d8
This article digs deep into the practice of gratitude, and the Japanese art of self-reflection. You know the nice thing about Japanese self-reflection, right? Better fuel efficiency! ;-)

Being organized can save you money (Democrat and Chronicle – Rochester, NY)
URL: http://tinyurl.com/577j7u 
How to avoid buying things you already have. (a.k.a., How to reduce the time you spend looking for things from 12 weeks a year to 10 weeks.)

If you know of something in the news that should be featured here, let us know!

Introduced by Lance Brown

Man oh man, are there a lot of ways to share stuff on the web these days! By now, everyone but my mother is signed up to some “social networking” site or another. Luckily, the web is also generous in supplying ways for us website operators to help you help us by helping your friends know about all the fascinating and informative things we put out into the world.

So whether you want to Digg something you’ve read, or “tweet” about it on Twitter, or tell folks that you’ve Reddit, or Stumbled Upon it….or maybe you want to hang it on the NewsVine, because you find it Del.ic.ious. Or perhaps you think it should be part of the Global Grind, or the Sphere, or the Hyves—or just part of the good ol’ Yahoo Buzz…

No matter who you think should get their grimy little hands on our latest edition of whatever, our new Share/Save tool will help you spread the love. Not only can you submit our dulcet tomes to all the current hip web services (and the hip ones from last month), you can also use it to send links along via cranky old email—or if you’re a real old-schooler, you can just use it as a quick way to bookmark the page in your browser. (Don’t worry, we won’t tell your Facebook friends that you passed up the chance to tweet some delicious linkedin digg buzz their way.)

Here’s what the icon looks like:    (This one’s not an active button.)

If you want to try out this rather impressive gizmo, you can use it to broadcast the online version of this newsletter to whatever universes you’re connected to. Just open up the web page, and scroll down to the bottom. Click the Share/Save icon, and tweet/buzz/digg to your heart’s content! Your friends will thank you – and so do we. :-)

Introduced by Lance Brown

Truthfully, this week’s Keep Smiling item is way better seen than described. I don’t think you have to be a geek to appreciate it—though I bet animators get an even bigger kick out of it than us civilians. Still, even if design humor is not your forte, it’s impossible not to appreciate the hard work and creativity that went into this tremendously imaginative exploration of one man’s rather silly journey to the edge of geek madness. You’ll never look at stick figures in the same way again. :-)

Click the image to view the whole (short) video:

URL: http://tinyurl.com/37s6xo

Thanks to 18-year-old Alan Becker for creating this great animation!

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Thanks for reading!

Publication Information
————————————————————————–
The Simplifier is published by:
Project Simplify
P.O. Box 597
Nevada City, CA 95959
phone: 530.205.5775
web: www.projectsimplify.com
e-mail: (newsletter@projectsimplify.com) newsletter (at) projectsimplify (dot) com