Lots growth and expansion for me and my business recently, and with it the discomfort of going beyond what’s comfy and into the land of “stretchy-growy.” Video being a big part of that, and funny thing is, I’m finding making these a ton of fun now.

I find that to be the case most of the time. Whatever resistance I have, whatever scenarios I’m imagining that are scary or unknown, it turns out to be easier, better or more fun. Though, I do my best to remember that, it’s still a wild ride on the inside.

Often, this time of year, we are reflecting on our year, where we wanted to be and looking ahead to the clean slate of the new year.

While I am very introspective, I also had to learn how to slow down and actually celebrate, acknowledge and applaud my growth, successes and “wins.”

Naturally, given my enthusiasm and energy, I’m inclined to only “sort of” acknowledge my progress: “Wow, that worked out well! OK, on to the next thing!”

But I’ve learned that a crucial part of creation is celebrating how far I’ve come, and deliberately letting go of the things in my life that no longer serve who I am now.

“Celebrate your accomplishments so thoroughly as to burn the bridges of who you were before,” is how Brian Regnier put it.

The idea here is to so completely acknowledge our growth that everything we do going forward will be from this new vantage point. That the old will be left behind and from that new horizons and new possibilities are now both conceivable and achievable.

From this new place, each of us has the opportunity to recreate anew – to envision and imagine what we want in our lives from an entirely new place.

Even if you don’t feel that you have accomplished enough of your goals this year, I invite you to look at the micro-changes, the baby-steps, the starts and progress you have made this year.

Those “small” accomplishments combined to create a massive difference, and more importantly, if we acknowledge our baby steps by focusing on what IS working rather than what is not, we create more room for the bigger changes to come too.

Here is a simple exercise to help you celebrate your accomplishments this year:

• Write down everything that you are proud of this year, every little and big thing.
• Trust what occurs to you and get it out on paper so your subconscious mind can begin digesting all you have done.
• Then, answer these questions either in writing or out loud with a trusted friend:
  • What is possible for me now?
  • What can I see for my life now?
  • What do I want my life to be like now?
• Now, with these new possibilities written down, brainstorm your New Year’s resolutions or 2015 Goals and Intentions.

The point is to set our goals and intentions from where we are now, not where we were a year ago. I find this exercise really helps me to lock into my consciousness how far I’ve come and how much I’ve grown.

Give it a try and let me know how it goes for you! I can’t wait to hear.

Thank you to everyone who responded to my Thanksgiving post. I received a flurry of “I feel the same way!” and “Me, toos.” It seems I struck a cord, and for that I am once again grateful to get to do what I do, because part of it is stretching myself to articulate the uncomfortable and messy stuff we all go through as entrepreneurs.

I do hope those in the US enjoyed a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend. Now, as we move our attention to the full-on holiday season, I am going to be bold and ask:

This year, will you let yourself off the hook for the holiday season?

Will you go easy and do your best to avoid putting pressure on yourself to do the holiday a certain way and/or have your house look and your cooking be “just so”?

SO much is going on, and a lot of it is fun and festive and feels good!

But then there is the to-do list that goes on for days, cards to address and send, presents to buy, wrap and send or hide, meals to prepare and cook, and packing for travel and trips. It goes on and on.

After noticing how I felt getting ready for the holidays several years ago, I implemented a policy for myself. I call it “No Adding.” By that I mean that I plan out the month of my parties, errands, deadlines, travel – everything – and then make the mental decision to not add anything else.

A few years ago during the week before Christmas, a colleague told me that he had just scheduled a regular check-up with his doctor. I was incredulous, wondering, “Unless you are sick, why would you do that?!? You could just as easily have the check-up in January.”

Since all the holiday prep and celebrations go on top of the usual day-to-day busy of work, life and family, I avoid adding other stuff that can wait until January. Or, if it’s an opportunity to go have fun, I’ll assess if I need to not do something else or whether I want to carve some extra time out for “nothing time.”

With everything, I want it to be a conscious choice, so if you really, really want to go, by all means go!

Just do so with the honest assessment that you have perhaps now overscheduled yourself. You may need to cut back on another activity and / or may need to add some rest and rejuvenation time into your schedule.

If we were all to let go of the “deadline” aspect of the holidays and with it the pressure to be perfectly prepared, we’d all have a hell of a lot more fun.

We’d be more in the moment, and truly enjoying time with family and friends – which is the whole point!

So will you do it? Will you let yourself off the hook? Drop me a note and let me know!

In these days before Thanksgiving, when we think about being grateful for the abundance in our lives, I want to share something deeply personal with you.

Owning a business, especially a “heart-centered” business, is not for the faint of heart. It takes guts, perseverance and courage. Sometimes it is scary, putting myself “out there”, day after day. After all, those of us with our own businesses must get up and stretch ourselves outside of our comfort zone every day.

You may be thinking, “Of course!” But I don’t just mean the focus and guts, perseverance and courage required to put ourselves out there externally: to market, sell and serve.

I also mean the internal work and effort that may not be as obvious to others but in fact, requires digging deeply into ourselves to find the strength and focus we need to go out in the world, attract the right clients and help them succeed.

I have learned that a big part of the “work” is actually internal. I have also learned that as we grow into our own voices, and as we expand and get out there more, there will be tests.

By tests I mean failures, stumbling blocks and big, fat, life-altering lessons. And they are extremely uncomfortable. These stumbling blocks, these “stretchy-growy” moments, can sometimes last for days.

It’s as though the Universe, while acknowledging my growth to date, is still asking me, “How much do you want it? Are you willing to turn yourself inside out and look at every part of yourself – the good, the bad, your strengths, your weaknesses?”

I have learned that this is what it takes.

Since a heart-centered business is the expression of who we are on a very personal level, and since we have already chosen to integrate our heart and our heads and to do so in the public eye, our inner and outer selves must match. We must be “in alignment.”

To illustrate, let me tell you about last spring, when one of these big tests came along that brought me to my knees. I mean this both metaphorically and literally.

After realizing something was definitely “off” in me and my business that was showing up in my sales, I began to look inside myself and turn over every “rock,” asking myself, “Do I want this? Did I choose this piece of myself consciously?

Many of the rocks I turned over I did want to keep, some of them being my gifts and the best parts of myself. But some of them I decidedly did not want.

Some of them were beliefs I had adopted from someone else, and others were completely ALL mine and totally out of sync with who I want to be.

It was also during this time that I, for the very first time ever, learned to pray, literally on my knees.

Up until then, while I had developed a consistent meditation practice some time ago and was always happy to receive prayers or be part of a prayer, I had never really prayed for myself.

“I began a conversation with God” is how Elizabeth Gilbert put it in Eat, Pray, Love, and I think that is a very apt way to put it. Within a few weeks of beginning to pray, I noticed day to day life and business just started getting easier. I felt more centered and grounded, and my sales increased right away.

Having been conditioned all my life to value the intellectual and the logical, just sharing my story with you now makes me feel very vulnerable. I still have a lingering bit of fear that I won’t be taken seriously if I declare my spirituality so publicly.

But there it is! Between the inner work I did last spring, and my new-found connection and conversation with God, business picked up.  Better still, I now have a new appreciation for accepting the spiritual side of me and letting it help me maintain more consistent alignment of all that I am.

The habit of conversations with God is not a one-time-only fix. It has become part of a consistent daily practice that I use to help me stay in sync. But I have made a start and it is making a difference in both my inner and outer lives.

So what I am most grateful for this year, is that I get to share this part of my story with you. That while I meet great clients and cool colleagues, all the while I get to be ME – thoroughly, unapologetically me.

Here I am cheering for Penny Lane Crull as the Emcee for the simulcast video feed at Lisa Cherney’s 6 Figures on Your Terms event. 

What makes me truly grateful is that the more open, spontaneous, authentic and vulnerable I am, the better my personal relationships and my business are.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!

P.S. If this sparked something in you, I’d love to hear from you. Simply hit reply and drop me a note. <3

[Structure Supports Flow]

Some days are just a little more trying than others, a little funky, a little “off”, you know? Life happens, upsets occur – we all have days like this.

I figure they are part of the ebb and flow of life. I was not always like this – events would throw me off and it would take a little while to get me out of my upset.

Instead of hoping for “perfect” days (ha!) all the time, what I strive to do is shift out of the funk and back to feeling good (or at least neutral) as fast as I can.

For a small upset, this could be a few minutes or hours, and for bigger upsets, a couple of days.  While I absolutely believe in honoring my feelings, I want to do what I need to do to “reboot” myself so I avoid being off balance for very long.

When I notice I’m feeling off, I begin my own reboot sequence, a structure created to support my feeling better as quickly as possible.

Here’s what I do, so you can give this a try:

1. Notice IF and WHEN we’re feeling off – it could be big, or a low grade feeling of “something is not quite right.”
2. Look inside to see what may be upsetting us, and figure out what needs to happen to reboot ourselves.
3. Identify a handful of ways we can choose from to help us shift into a more positive state of mind.
4. Have an immediate reboot plan you can do in 5-10 minutes, and a longer one you can come back to later for bigger upsets.

Some of these reboot ideas may seem obvious – “here we go again, talking about exercise” – but often what is obvious become so because they work.

Some ideas to quickly reboot yourself – and add your own:

• Call a friend, someone who always makes you feel good, even if all you talk about are day-to-day things.
• Laugh about something – find a video online that always makes you laugh.
• Dance – this works, too – it goes without saying, dance to your favorite song.
• Meditate in whatever form makes you comfortable. Even sitting in silence and thinking calm thoughts can work.
• Take a walk / exercise – remember that as over-used this advice is, it works!
• Do something fun that you enjoy – only you can decide for yourself what is fun for you.

This is a fantastic structure to support our shifting out of upsets and feeling our best as much as possible, regardless of the ups and downs.

[Structure Supports Flow]

When I talk about Productive Puttering, which is at least a few times a week, clients, friends and new people I meet at events get really excited.

It’s such a radical shift from the way we typically work – the linear, methodical results-oriented focused way, which can feel restrictive if that’s the ONLY way we work.

When hearing about Productive Puttering, folks say it’s the best of both worlds. You mean I can do what comes to mind AND get a ton done?!?

Conventional wisdom has it that we must focus all the time if we are to be effective and efficient. But let’s face it, we’re all different, and have different rhythms and proclivities. We all could lighten up on ourselves – the highly focused, get-it-done-now approach, while highly important can be exhausting if it is our only approach to what we do, day after day.

One way to look at Productive Puttering is that it helps us get something done using yin energy – relaxed and easy – rather than the yang energy of force and pushing.

Try this simple exercise and see for yourself just how much you can get done, and more importantly, how you feel afterwards.

• Set an alarm for an hour or two, and write a short list of only 3-5 items that will only take 5-10 minutes each to complete.
• Give yourself permission to do what it is you are drawn to do, whatever that is, without any pressure to actually finish any one thing.
• Go with whatever occurs to you: finish that email, clean your office, do the dishes, whatever it is.
• Every so often, check your short list and pick an item and get that crossed off: make a call, figure out travel dates for an upcoming trip, etc.

It doesn’t matter how it gets done, stuff is getting done and finished. But it’s getting done in a non-linear way without the pressure of having to focus on only one thing at a time all day every day.

Incorporate this approach in addition to more focused, get-it-done work and see how you feel.

I can’t wait to hear what you think – drop me a note and let me know!

[Structure Supports Flow]

It has been a few months now since I started writing these Structure Supports Flow tips and I’ve received a ton of great feedback about how much you are getting out of them.

Thank you for reaching out to me, hearing about your big and small shifts and how you’ve put the tips into action in your daily life make me so happy! That’s EXACTLY what I wanted. Yay!

Please keep the emails coming, I love hearing from you all!

On to this week’s tip:

Over the summer, I began to pay attention to a structure that I’d been loosely using and finally incorporated it into my life.

You may have heard about “batching time,” where we group similar tasks or functions into blocks of time and do only that with singular focus. While I’ve been batching my time in short increments for years now, I had yet to batch entire days.

I had been noticing that certain days would be generally focused on a specific function in my business (clients, sales, networking/outreach, marketing, administration). But I was very loose with it, and frankly, wishy-washy.

In anticipation a busy early August this year, I decided to batch my time more rigorously, and set my own boundary about my time clearly to myself and others. This was at the beginning of July, and by late July, I noticed that I was feeling so much more calm and focused.

“Hmm…” I thought to myself, “what did I change recently to create this?” I quickly realized that the only thing new was that I was sticking to my plan to batch my time.

It made such a difference that I’ve been singing the praises of batching time to everyone who will listen ever since.

As an example, here is a general outline of my week:

1. Monday: Admin & Organization / Connection Calls & Coaching for me
2. Tuesday: Sales / Networking
3. Wednesday: Private Client Calls
4. Thursday: Sales / Uncork Your Confidence Clients / Networking
5. Friday: Marketing & Writing / Sales / Admin

I realize that given the nature of your job or your daily duties, batching every day of the week may not be possible for you. However, take a look at Monday or Friday, which tend to be slightly less hectic for most of us, and see how you could schedule 1 or 2 specific functions or projects on that day.

If that still doesn’t seem doable, then start with one specific task and schedule it on your calendar for the same time every day. I’d encourage you to start with your email time and batch it into two time slots, once in the morning and once in the afternoon.

Answering individual emails throughout the day is a complete time drain, and it can take us upwards of 20 minutes to get back on task. This structure alone will help you flow with the projects that take concentration.

And, if you’re ready for the “ninja level,” go ahead and start to batch every day of the week. To do so, think about when you naturally want and like to do certain types of work and then write it down and put it on your calendar.

You could incorporate this in big and small ways, starting from where ever you are now.

Whatever stage you are at, be patient with yourself as you create this new habit. The world we live in is full of distractions that pull at our attention, so it may take a little time to get into the groove of it.

[Structure Supports Flow]

On certain days, when there is a lot going on, I notice thoughts pop into my head at a greater frequency than on quieter days. It’s as though my mind knows how busy I am, and wants to make sure I don’t forget anything.

Thoughts pop up in my head, no matter what I am doing, reminding about meetings on my calendar and items on my to-do list, as well as other things that I don’t have written down anywhere.

I love that this busy mind of mine supports me and wants to help me keep all the balls in the air, but all this reminding can be really distracting when I am trying to focus on the task at hand.

All these fleeting “don’t forget this” thoughts take up a lot of my brain space and can make my head cloudy and muddled.

A few years ago, when I began to notice how insidious this is, I began to hear a little voice in my head right after my mind reminded me of something. “Do it now,” I hear loudly and clearly.

What that means is that my mind is suggesting I either do it right away and get it out of my mental space, or write it down somewhere so my mind recognizes a “to-do” detail has been noted and tracked.

This structure is similar to the rule of thumb that if you can respond to an email in less than 2 minutes, it’s best to do it right away.

For example, I may hear “Don’t forget your notebook today!” and then quickly, I’ll hear “Do it now.” So, I’ll take the 30 seconds needed to grab the notebook and put it in my purse. Or, sometimes it’s “You need to call Julie back,” and since this will take longer than 2-minutes, I’ll write down on my to-do list. 

Then, having dealt with it, my mind stops reminding me about it every 15 minutes and I can be less distracted and flow with what is right in front of me.

Begin to bring this structure into practice for yourself. First and foremost, start to notice your thoughts, what your mind is afraid you’ll forget, and use that reminder to create a trigger in your mind that prompts the next thought to be “Do it now.”

Next, take the action right away: either do it or write it down.

You could say that this exercise is an inside job because much of it happens in your mind. It takes a lot of awareness and diligence at first while you develop the habit but soon enough, you will find it happening automatically.

This is a great way to train your mind to help you in a way that supports your actually getting things done, rather than distracting you with reminders.

If you want to learn how you can use structures to support your flow in your business, I’m opening up my schedule to speak with ONLY 3 people who want to get results that feel good along the way. If one of them is YOU, reply to this email and reserve your spot!