LivingUndaunted

New Breakthrough on Productivity

An exciting new development in my own personal productivity that I wanted to share.

Went to a conference this weekend...always love that. After that, I am bubbling with ideas, focused, alive, excited, open to possibilities.

So here's the productivity breakthrough.

I am pathological about responding to e-mail. I'm talking, "family-waiting-in-the-car-but-I'll-just-check-it-one-last-time-although-I-checked-it-10-minutes-ago" pathological. "Up-til-2:00-a.m." pathological. Not only do I respond to e-mail, but to be thorough, I'll often go on for pages at a time, particularly if it's a topic I love. Often I wonder...if I could find a way to package these e-mails, how much more productive would I be?

I am, however, notoriously clever in finding reasons to put off my own business writing, my e-books, courses, etc.

So I had this idea for a new e-book at the conference and right away started getting ideas of what should be included. I quickly made an outline of about 50 points that need to be covered in it and the "5 Key Strategies" it would include.

So I thought...hm, how about I combine these two ideas? I wrote each "subject" as an e-mail from a client and I loaded them all into one of my autoresponders, so that each day I'll be getting an e-mail from "a client" looking for me to explain this concept.

The e-mails will start arriving tomorrow. Let's see if this sufficiently puzzles my brain into working. I have had success with other "fool myself" strategies, like telling myself I have to leave an hour or half hour (depending on distance) earlier than I really have to leave, or that an "assignment" or article or bit of work is due days before it really is.

So I am really excited to see how this works out. I'll keep you posted!

Maria

Ruminations On Post-Information-Age Society

Ruminations on Post-Information-Age Society

Day 2 of blogging and all is well.

It's such an amazing and expanding time, I am swallowed up by all the possible avenues I can take. It's beautiful, like being in wonderland.

I saw an awesome program on television the other night (yes, it's true, squeezed in there between Paris Hilton and those poor people kissing up to Donald Trump, there was some decent t.v. on this week). It was on the National Geographic channel, which my cable company is throwing me as a freebie in the hopes that I'll sign up for $10 more a month of brain drain.

The show is called Worlds Apart and I suppose it qualifies as a reality show, except it is everything that is meaningful and important about reality, and no one got into a fight or threw anything (although there was some crying). Check out Worlds Apart site

The premise of the show was that a higher-than-average-income suburban family from New Jersey (their house had 5 bathrooms in it) went to Kenya to spend 9 days with a Kenyan bush family. The NJ family consisted of a lanky 15-year-old girl who started the journey thinking things in Kenya would be "cute" and two youngers boys, I'd say 8 and 10, abouts, who, in their New Jersey life seemed to spend the day on the GameBoy and in front of the t.v. In fact, in the beginning, one of them, eyes glassy as he stared at the screen, said something like, "Pretty much all I do is play video games and watch t.v. I'm not sure what you can do without electricity."

Well, I don't need to tell you the rest of the story. They got to Kenya, and not only was there no electricity or 5 bathrooms (actually there was one community hole in the ground which had been ceremoniously draped with a canopy of papers or sheets in their honor, as it was usually just a hole out in the open), they had to eat food that they'd seen slaughtered, the women served the men and the men were the "elders" (the hen-pecked NJ dad seemed to really get into that old warrior way of looking at the world).

The meltdowns started immediately. The 15-year-old who had been expecting a stuffed-animal safari was the first to lose it, although just about everyone turned into a snivelling mess at some point.

But that wasn't the beauty of the show. That's not what I took away from it.

As all the trappings and distractions of their US life fell away, this family found something very basic, important and human in the experience. The young boy was heard commenting about being able just to walk with his dad, not remembering the last time he'd done that.

Once, after mistakenly dipping a dog bowl into the clan's drinking water, potentially contaminating the water supply and endangering all their lives, the 8-year-old learned that actions can have real consequences, and he cried the tears of someone understanding the truths of human survival, the strength in needing to make choices that really matter, the responsibility inherent in concerning himself with the community.

And the oneness of us all really shone through in the Kenyans' responses. The mother of their host family, a beautiful woman with an endless smile, held him to her ample bosom and told him in her African-accented English, "That is alright, don't you worry. You didn't know, we didn't tell you. Mistakes are how we learn. Now you will know not to do that again. Mistakes teach us."

And another night, as the boy cried over something else, the father of the family took him and held him in a gentle, fatherly way, and spoke so movingly to him, telling him, "Don't you cry now. This is a good boy here. He has the heart of a warrior," and soothed him so completely, that as the boy sleepily closed his eyes, he said, "He has such a way of calming me."

The show reinforced feelings, rumblings, concerns, signs of the future for me. Actually, on some small scale, it reminded me of being in Cyprus, living for nearly a month in a 4-room house in a village of about 10 houses. Of course my poor mother-in-law, whose house it was, would DIE at the thought of being compared to African nomads, and indeed conditions in Cyprus were considerably more "modern", electricity, refrigeration and automobiles abounded, but there were similarities as well. In Cyprus, with only 3 boring television channels, even mindless channel surfing was impossible, so that you needed to find other entertainments. When you stepped outside the front door, a hundred-year-old fig tree gave you shade which brought true respite from the heat. Neighbors wandered in unannounced and there was always room for one more.

Now, don't think me down on our urbanized US society. I don't know what I'd do without my NYC theatre, my huge selection of everything, my every whim satisfied. But...

Things I'm learning:

1. Our rabid individualism, which we consider a great strength, is also part of our downfall. There are so few social safety nets, not in the sense of Welfare and government programs, but in the sense of a community that is always there to regulate and support you. If we choose to, we can spend way too much time alone, unsupported.

2. The things we design and buy to "make our lives easier" actually complicate things a lot. Funny for an online marketing coach to ponder, since I passionately love the internet and the amazing community it can foster and computers, and gourmet supermarkets, but there is something beautiful about satisfying your basic needs in a straightforward way.

3. It is too easy to "unfocus" and let go for us in Westernized society. Who ever has to tell that family in Kenya, "live in the moment"? They must, as they find food, do physical labor to get basic needs met and take care of their own. Television that lets you space out and the limitless ability to worry about the abstract, since the concrete is all handled, moral relativism, all these things conspire to rob us of this present moment.

The bittersweet fact about all this is that once you've lived and indeed been completely steeped in the Western way of life, there is very real chance of living a life that basic. Sure, a few brave souls can renounce it all and move to the mountains, but for most of us the lure of drive-throughs and Home Depot and Amazon.com will forever have a hold on us. As a case in point, after I got used to my early morning meditations on the quiet hill in Cyprus a half a mile away from my mother-in-law's house where I could see the ocean, after I watched her make goat cheese in her garage, after I accompanied the archeologist in residence in the village up to the 4000 year old ruins, (see a picture of the archeological dig here) I still passionately wanted to come home to my instant internet access and my dishwasher.

So what to do with these divided loyalties? Well, first, I want to take some kind of survival course, one or two weeks, to really experience, rather than intellectualize about, living on a basic level. Secondly, I resolve to completely let go and immerse myself in the Cyprus experience as we visit each summer.

And thirdly, and this is most important, I will take a time each week to blank out all the distractions, electronic and otherwise, and just BE here, walking on the hills around my house, playing games with my children, doing things with my hands. It is as close as I can be to that beautiful African nomad.

How Awesome Manhattan Looks In The Snow

Why I love marketing and how awesome Manhattan looks in falling snow

It's 11:00 p.m. and we're getting fairy-drift snow, light as flakes from angels' wings falling here in the New York City area. I just drove home from a seminar I did in NYC and the drive was just divine, powder floating all around, everything in slow motion. It's moments like these that I really love what I do.

My class was on marketing and it was good on a whole bunch of levels, a few potential clients came to speak to me at the end, plus on the whole drive over there I just had amazing brainstorms about a whole new potential source of revenue (gotta love that, more on it in another post), so I've just been really up today.

But no. Why I love marketing. It turns out we are all just trying to have conversations that make sense. I always love to connect with the types of people who take my seminars (cuz they just rock), but also they are all earnestly trying to figure out how to talk about what they do in a way that is compelling to people, how to bring meaning to other people's lives.

Rather than get cynical because people come trying to "find the angle" I just get more jazzed up because I find that people are really just trying to find the truth. Even in making money. In life. Everywhere.

And people never cease to surprise me...I learn to challenge my stereotypes all the time. There was an elderly gentleman in the class. At the start of class we had time to talk and he told me his story, having just retired, starting a new busines (gotta love someone with that kind of gumption). But I do a "web marketing" portion to my class at the end, and I often worry that some of the more techie stuff in there will put some people to sleep. I glanced at him from time to time and while everyone feverishly took notes and asked questions, he just listened. I thought, oops, I've lost him for sure.

At the end of class he came up to me and told me how very much the web marketing stuff had impressed him, and that he absolutely agreed that the internet is an amazing force in human history. He told me the story of his fellow Vietnam buddies and a site they put up about their experiences and how it led to calls from the Smithsonian, the Canadian government and a bunch of other high-level organizations, without "marketing" the site or doing much to get it listed anywhere.

So go figure. The guy in the corner who's not taking notes might just be listening so intently he doesn't have to.

Maria

Ruminations of Post-Information Age Society

Ruminations on Post-Information-Age Society

Day 2 of blogging and all is well.

It's such an amazing and expanding time, I am swallowed up by all the possible avenues I can take. It's beautiful, like being in wonderland.

I saw an awesome program on television the other night (yes, it's true, squeezed in there between Paris Hilton and those poor people kissing up to Donald Trump, there was some decent t.v. on this week). It was on the National Geographic channel, which my cable company is throwing me as a freebie in the hopes that I'll sign up for $10 more a month of brain drain.

The show is called Worlds Apart and I suppose it qualifies as a reality show, except it is everything that is meaningful and important about reality, and no one got into a fight or threw anything (although there was some crying). Check out Worlds Apart site

The premise of the show was that a higher-than-average-income suburban family from New Jersey (their house had 5 bathrooms in it) went to Kenya to spend 9 days with a Kenyan bush family. The NJ family consisted of a lanky 15-year-old girl who started the journey thinking things in Kenya would be "cute" and two youngers boys, I'd say 8 and 10, abouts, who, in their New Jersey life seemed to spend the day on the GameBoy and in front of the t.v. In fact, in the beginning, one of them, eyes glassy as he stared at the screen, said something like, "Pretty much all I do is play video games and watch t.v. I'm not sure what you can do without electricity."

Well, I don't need to tell you the rest of the story. They got to Kenya, and not only was there no electricity or 5 bathrooms (actually there was one community hole in the ground which had been ceremoniously draped with a canopy of papers or sheets in their honor, as it was usually just a hole out in the open), they had to eat food that they'd seen slaughtered, the women served the men and the men were the "elders" (the hen-pecked NJ dad seemed to really get into that old warrior way of looking at the world).

The meltdowns started immediately. The 15-year-old who had been expecting a stuffed-animal safari was the first to lose it, although just about everyone turned into a snivelling mess at some point.

But that wasn't the beauty of the show. That's not what I took away from it.

As all the trappings and distractions of their US life fell away, this family found something very basic, important and human in the experience. The young boy was heard commenting about being able just to walk with his dad, not remembering the last time he'd done that.

Once, after mistakenly dipping a dog bowl into the clan's drinking water, potentially contaminating the water supply and endangering all their lives, the 8-year-old learned that actions can have real consequences, and he cried the tears of someone understanding the truths of human survival, the strength in needing to make choices that really matter, the responsibility inherent in concerning himself with the community.

And the oneness of us all really shone through in the Kenyans' responses. The mother of their host family, a beautiful woman with an endless smile, held him to her ample bosom and told him in her African-accented English, "That is alright, don't you worry. You didn't know, we didn't tell you. Mistakes are how we learn. Now you will know not to do that again. Mistakes teach us."

And another night, as the boy cried over something else, the father of the family took him and held him in a gentle, fatherly way, and spoke so movingly to him, telling him, "Don't you cry now. This is a good boy here. He has the heart of a warrior," and soothed him so completely, that as the boy sleepily closed his eyes, he said, "He has such a way of calming me."

The show reinforced feelings, rumblings, concerns, signs of the future for me. Actually, on some small scale, it reminded me of being in Cyprus, living for nearly a month in a 4-room house in a village of about 10 houses. Of course my poor mother-in-law, whose house it was, would DIE at the thought of being compared to African nomads, and indeed conditions in Cyprus were considerably more "modern", electricity, refrigeration and automobiles abounded, but there were similarities as well. In Cyprus, with only 3 boring television channels, even mindless channel surfing was impossible, so that you needed to find other entertainments. When you stepped outside the front door, a hundred-year-old fig tree gave you shade which brought true respite from the heat. Neighbors wandered in unannounced and there was always room for one more.

Now, don't think me down on our urbanized US society. I don't know what I'd do without my NYC theatre, my huge selection of everything, my every whim satisfied. But...

Things I'm learning:

1. Our rabid individualism, which we consider a great strength, is also part of our downfall. There are so few social safety nets, not in the sense of Welfare and government programs, but in the sense of a community that is always there to regulate and support you. If we choose to, we can spend way too much time alone, unsupported.

2. The things we design and buy to "make our lives easier" actually complicate things a lot. Funny for an online marketing coach to ponder, since I passionately love the internet and the amazing community it can foster and computers, and gourmet supermarkets, but there is something beautiful about satisfying your basic needs in a straightforward way.

3. It is too easy to "unfocus" and let go for us in Westernized society. Who ever has to tell that family in Kenya, "live in the moment"? They must, as they find food, do physical labor to get basic needs met and take care of their own. Television that lets you space out and the limitless ability to worry about the abstract, since the concrete is all handled, moral relativism, all these things conspire to rob us of this present moment.

The bittersweet fact about all this is that once you've lived and indeed been completely steeped in the Western way of life, there is very real chance of living a life that basic. Sure, a few brave souls can renounce it all and move to the mountains, but for most of us the lure of drive-throughs and Home Depot and Amazon.com will forever have a hold on us. As a case in point, after I got used to my early morning meditations on the quiet hill in Cyprus a half a mile away from my mother-in-law's house where I could see the ocean, after I watched her make goat cheese in her garage, after I accompanied the archeologist in residence in the village up to the 4000 year old ruins, (see a picture of the archeological dig here) I still passionately wanted to come home to my instant internet access and my dishwasher.

So what to do with these divided loyalties? Well, first, I want to take some kind of survival course, one or two weeks, to really experience, rather than intellectualize about, living on a basic level. Secondly, I resolve to completely let go and immerse myself in the Cyprus experience as we visit each summer.

And thirdly, and this is most important, I will take a time each week to blank out all the distractions, electronic and otherwise, and just BE here, walking on the hills around my house, playing games with my children, doing things with my hands. It is as close as I can be to that beautiful African nomad.

Welcome to my Blog

Welcome to my blog.

My thoughts today are around thinking bigger. I am making a commitment to expand my dreams and ideas beyond what I consider possible right now.

Every time I have thought bigger, I have grown into my expanded vision. The first time I can remember doing this is as an awkward and friendless grade schooler who, the child of immigrants, had all the wrong clothes and none of the savvy of the other pre-teens. There was a girl named Barbara, the coolest kid in the class, all Brady Bunch blonde hair and the right brand sneakers. I wanted to be her friend.

Of course it was impossible, being entirelly the wrong sort for her crowd, but somehow it happened. I can't even remember how it began, but in time we learned we lived just five blocks apart (not as common as you would think, since I attended a parochial school which my parents struggled mightily to afford, and which attracted families from far and wide). In the summers, we'd meet at the halfway point between her house and mine and I'd soak up her coolness and quiet confidence. We became inseparable, liked the same boys, listened to music in her room endlessly.

At 18, when I expanded my vision beyond living at home and decided to go out on my own, I found the way to manage it, bohemian existence and all, despite the fact that I was the first person in my family to do that. When, at 25 I decided I didn't want to have a boss, I expanded my vision to include having my own business, which in a year and a half grew into two locations.

When I dreamed of speaking in front of crowds, I made it happen. When I discovered coaching and in disbelief learned that I could make a living bringing out the best in people, I transitioned into what seemed like an improbable dream of an existence.

And now, I want to challenge myself to think bigger again. It would be easy to get complacent here, look down with vertigo at the height which I've already climbed from that scared, awkward girl and say, "Whew, you've made it."

But no. Tonight I thought long and hard about it and want to start this blog with publishing my vision. Nothing like a little pressure to keep me honest.

The short-term vision- a membership site rich in content bigger than I believe I can create right now. Fabulous programs, the titles of which I'm accumulating in my hard drive, will start to get crafted into something that will bring inspiration and help to people. I will publish the darn e-book already, this long year in the making.

I will be authentic, forget once and for all to try to "figure out what sells" or "say the right thing" and just be completely myself, quirks and all, and let those who want that find me.

I will shop a book proposal starting in March, and keep at it until I get an agent and a publisher, or until I decide that I need to self publish (hey, if it worked for The Celestine Prophesies, it can work for me).

I will begin to collect and remind myself of stories about improbable successes... Martha Stewart (okay, bad example right now, but hey) built a massive empire starting out as a caterer. Walt Disney built his fortune on little drawings. Danny DeVito makes a pretty improbable leading man.

Which is not to say I am such an improbably success story. Instead it is to say... success has no blueprint. You can't be the next Danny DeVito or Walt Disney because that's already been done. The best you can do is be the next you, with new rules, new surprises, new definitions of what it means to succeed.

So I resolve to think bigger this year and always. Hey, it's worked this far.