Hooray for Guest Post Wednesday and the super-nifty Gareth!

photo credit: the trial

You’re happily riding your Kalamazoo, steadily making progress along the track that is your chosen path, when you go into a tunnel. “No worries” you think “as long as I keep plugging away I’ll reach the other side”. So you keep on pumping away, making steady progress, when you hear a noise. You look up and see a light. “Fantastic, that must be the end of the tunnel”. So you carry on, blissfully unaware of what lies in store. A short while later, you feel an oncoming breeze, and look up, seeing that the light is now much closer. “Awesome, I’m making better progress than I thought possible.” You put your head down to continue, and the train runs you over.

This is what burnout looks like for most of us. We see the signs, but either we ignore them, or we paint them in a less serious light and continue on until it’s too late.

There’s just one problem with this approach. Recovering from burnout is a bugger. Burnout shreds your confidence. It leads to regret, doubt and guilt. So much guilt. Regret that we didn’t heed the signs. Doubt that we’ll ever step back onto the track again. Guilt that we can’t deliver on our promises. Guilt that we’ve let others down. Guilt that we’ve let ourselves down.

But I’m not telling you anything new here. You know all about burnout. You know why it’s important to avoid it, yet you still ignore the signs.

The good news. You may not be doing this deliberately. It could be inattentional blindness, or more simply, you’re not expecting to see the signs, so you don’t notice them. The bad news. This is no consolation when burnout hits.

How do you start seeing, and paying attention to, the signs?

First, you need to be aware of what the signs are. Now everyone has different indicators prior to burnout, but there are a few that are universal. Tasks that are usually simple and effortless start to take longer and require far more concentration. You procrastinate more than usual. You feel lethargic and listless, regardless of the amount of caffeine you consume. Things that are of no consequence start to bother you. These are all signs that the train is approaching.

In addition to these universal signs, there are the more specific ones. For me there are two that are easy to spot. I struggle even more than usual to start blog posts. Normally, I write and delete the opening paragraph for a post 2 or 3 times, but, if the train is coming, that number can go up to double figures. I also move away from games and hobbies that require intelligent thought.

Sometimes, burnout comes on a schedule. I go through a mini-burnout every Wednesday. I always have. Because I know when the train runs, I can easily avoid it by not scheduling anything critical on a Wednesday. Your train will have a different timetable, but it’s likely that it has one. I know one of the other common ones is seasonal, with more frequent trains appearing in the winter months.

However, merely being aware of the signs is not enough. You have to interpret them correctly. Much like the onrushing wind by itself is not enough to deduce that a train is coming, it could just be a breeze, signs appearing singly, are not an indication of approaching burnout. But when you feel the wind, hear the click of the wheels and see the light, it’s time to get off the track.

Getting off the track does require a little planning though. If you post daily, you should try to get a couple of days ahead. If you have a full consulting schedule, you may want to block in some free time to recharge. If you tend to over commit, you need to practice saying “No!”

Losing a little time while waiting for the burnout train to go past is infinitely preferable to getting run over and needing weeks, if not months of recovery.

Your five-minute mission, should you choose to accept it…

Think back to the last time you got hit by the train, or even had a near miss. Remember what you felt like just before the event. What did you have trouble doing, how did you feel? If you can remember more than one incident, you can also look at timelines and see if there is any pattern occurring there.

Once you have some warning signs identified, make a plan. What are you going to do next time the train approaches? Tell me in the comments.

Gareth knows all about burnouts; he fights the Dragon of Mediocrity on a regular basis.

Want to guest post? I’d love to hear from you! Send an email to catherine@beawesomeonline.com today!

All hail Guest Post Wednesday and the excellent Gareth!

photo credit: jurvetson

There is a lot of talk about finding your Right People, or, if you’re trying to impress your mother-in-law*, your target demographic. Why you need to know this is easy to understand: once you have an idea of your Right People, you can cater to them.

But what about your Wrong People? Knowing who they are and how to gently encourage them to find somewhere else can be just as important.

The cost of working for the Wrong People is far higher than you would think. While you’re working for the Wrong People, you aren’t working for the Right People. Now this doesn’t seem to be too big a deal. After all, the Wrong People are paying you the same as the others. What’s the problem?

Working for your Wrong People has costs that cannot be weighed in mere coinage. The Wrong People are energy vampires. You feel as drained after dealing with them for an hour as you do after dealing with your Right People for a solid week. This energy drain translates into huge opportunity losses. As long as you have to deal with the Wrong People, you can’t go looking for your Right People, you don’t have the energy. You can’t create the products, write the content and generally be awesome so that your Right People know when they have found the place for them.

Basically, you get stuck in the position where you have to continue to work for your Wrong People because those are the only people you can find. Doing this is a one way ticket to the padded cell with white canvas long sleeved blazer.

So why? Why do you continue to work for your Wrong People?

You get trapped into working for the Wrong People because you haven’t taken the time to define who the Wrong People are. You need to understand what your Wrong Person likes and dislikes. You need to know the differences between the Wrong People and the Right People. You need to take steps to actively discourage your Wrong People.

Take some time now and figure out who your Wrong People are. Think about what they like and what they don’t like. Then, do some gentle dissuasion.

Gentle dissuasion requires that you look at the differences between your Right People and your Wrong People. Ideally, you’re looking for the things that your Right People like and your Wrong People dislike. Once you have this list, do more. This improves your connection to your Right People, and subtly (or not so subtly) encourages your Wrong People to go somewhere else.

If there aren’t any clear cut differences, there are two approaches you can use. Either you find the things that your Wrong People dislike but won’t have an impact on your Right People. Or find the things your Right People like that won’t have an effect on the Wrong People. The first pushes the Wrong People away, while the second improves your relationship with the Right People, making it harder for the Wrong People to be heard.

Your five-minute mission, should you choose to accept it…

Think of one thing you can do now to discourage your Wrong People and implement it. Then, come tell me what you did in the comments.

*I stole that line from Catherine, isn’t it glorious.

All hail Guest Post Wednesday and the ever-wonderful Gareth!

photo credit: Fuzzy Gerdes

Recently, our hostess, the Queen of Awesomesauce, went and did a 14km walk (that’s 9 miles for you anti-metric-ites), and the next day experienced a couple of minor aches and pains which got her thinking about the emotional cost of big work, and why you need to rest afterward.

It’s easy to spot the effect that physical exertion has, you hobble around like an old lady, have to walk down stairs backwards, and generally just creak. It’s not so easy to spot the signs of emotional exertion. These vary from person to person. One person may get ratty while another may become apathetic. Me, I tend towards lethargy, my work ethic goes from slow-and-steady to stopped-and-stationary.

Here are a couple of tricks I’ve learnt during marathon training that may help you out.

1 – You have to build up to it

You don’t just wake up one morning and decide to go run 42.2 km’s. You build up to it over a period of months or years, starting with once round the block and ending with the triumphant crossing of the finish line. You have to do the same with running an awesome website. Posting daily is great, if you can maintain it. Posting daily for a week, then burning out and not posting for 6 weeks is decidedly unawesome. Start by practicing in a nice safe enviroment, something like, 750 words. This is a nice place to get a feel for how much writing you can comfortably do, and it gives you a chance to stretch your comfort zone a little. The other nice thing is you can use it to prewrite blog posts during the practice. That way you get some buffer for the hectic weeks.

The one thing to be wary of while you’re building up though is self-criticism. If you miss a day, or 2 or 3, it’s fine. You just know that you weren’t ready for that schedule. However, you do know how many days you can go for without a break, and next time, you can try to go 1 better. Soon you’ll be on a such a roll that stopping doesn’t even enter into your head.

2 – Schedule Easy Periods

Training for a marathon is not a quick short term thing. You commit to it and you’re in it for the long haul. This is very much like the path to being awesome online. One of the most important things in a marathon training schedule is the concept of “the easy week” Every 4th week you take it easy. This doesn’t mean doing no training. It means not pushing yourself to go further or faster. The point of this week is to give your body a little chance of recuperating. You should be doing the same with your emotional work. Perhaps you could schedule 1 or 2 fewer coaching sessions or decide to let the product sit for a week. Give yourself some downtime. Don’t get caught into thinking that you should use the time you’ve freed up to write 17 guest posts. Instead take a break, read a book, watch a movie, or just go out and enjoy the sunshine, whatever relaxes you. A little chosen relaxation periodically, sure beats relaxation forced on you by those men in white coats.

3 – Listen to your body

This is critical, and incredibly hard to do. When you’re training, there are clear signs of overwork, you need more sleep, your legs feel heavy, even on a short run, and instead of being energised by exercise, you get lethargic. These signs are there for emotional marathons too, but they’re more subtle, and require a lot more self-awareness to pick up. If you start feeling out of sorts for no particular reason, it’s probably time to take a break. Learn your other warning signs. A little prevention here can prevent a big meltdown later.

4 – Taper

In your training schedule, the last week or two leading up to a marathon are referred to as taper weeks. What you do is gradually back off on your training so that by the time the race comes you’re desperate to run. This doesn’t mean stop all together, but where you were doing 60km in a week, you back it down to 40. They way to use this for your awesome website is easy. if you know you’re coming up to a big launch or a free consulting offer, you might want to scale back your commitments. Perhaps, post a “best of” series, or a beginners guide (especially useful if you’ve been going for a while) or even a couple of five-minute missions. That way, when the work piles on as your deadline looms, you’re fresh and eager for the challenge.

5 – Rest

After the big day, rest is critical. Even if you don’t think you need it, you do. It doesn’t need to be a long rest time, maybe a day or two, (it all depends on the magnitude of the event), but you do need rest. If you don’t rest, you might not notice it immediately, but very soon, something that would normally be a minor niggle, becomes a season ending injury(not something you want to have to go through if you could have prevented it). Far better to push back a few commitments than have to cancel them entirely.

Blogging, like running, gets under your skin very quickly. It becomes a reason to get up in the morning. Being a little sensible about it, means you can keep doing it, and have many successful race days.

Can your mind run long-distance yet? Tell us in the comments!

Gareth uses marathons to train for when he has to run away from the Dragon. An event that happens more often than he’d like.

Hooray for Guest Post Wednesday and Tara!

photo credit: Rosino

You are awesome online. You are rocking it. Your awesomeness is shining through everywhere from your About page to your Twitter stream.

But what about the untested waters of the offline world? Are you awesome there?

Or are you hiding behind your website? Terrified of meeting someone in person, afraid you’ll morph into a salesy slimeball who hands someone their business card and says, “Call me, baby.”?

Going offline can feel like that dream where you show up naked for school.

I am an pj-wearing, home-loving hermit. Most of my business is online. My relationships, my work, my helpfulness: it all happens online. But when I quit my dayjob, I knew that to really grow, I would need to start serving branch out and come out from behind the screen.

Before I did my first craft show, I never talked about my business in person. I told people I worked in HR (my dayjob) and had no idea what to tell them about my online alter ego. What would I say? Without the filter of my website, how could I explain what I did?

In person, I’m just me. No fancy graphics. No carefully crafted pages. No tried-50-times-to-get-this-one-picture first impressions. Just me.

Without the buffer of my website and my carefully chosen words and my perfectly focused pictures, it felt a little naked.

But it can be awesome.

Offline, you see the joy in someone’s eyes as they gasp at your lovingly handmade item.
Offline, you feel that immediate click when someone really gets you.
Offline, clients can sip coffee with you, show you pictures of their family, light up when you zap their problem.

Since that first pre-craft-show jitter I’ve peddled yarn at shows across the country, organized classes for wannabe-knitters and taught hundreds of one-on-one, in-person lessons. I’ve even met some of my online friends for a coffee.  All without losing my clothes or sweating through them.

And I learned that going offline can actually be fun, if you keep a few things in mind.

Three tips for being awesome offline

If the thought of meeting a real person, whether at a networking event or a craft show, has you sweating through your awesome shirt, here are some tips to bring your awesomeness offline as painless as possible.

1. Know what you do.

Well, of course you KNOW what you do…but do you have words for it? Can you explain it?

If you feel your tongue tying up just thinking about it, take a look around your website. What does IT say you do? (If it doesn’t say, you should probably hire Catherine to help you with that!)

A lot of business-y people talk about an “elevator speech”, but I’m not into it. When you meet someone, you don’t want to overwhelm them with your awesomeness (and why they should pay you for it), you want to open up a conversation. What could you say about what you do that would naturally lead to a conversation?

Start with an explanation of who you help. Follow it up with how you help them.

Or, if you make something, tell them what you make and who uses it.

Something like “I handmake yarn for yarn-obsessed knitters and crocheters. I also teach the knit-curious. Do you knit? Or know a knitter?”

Or “You know how a lot of crafters wish they could make money from their hobby? Well, I teach crafters business skills that can help them with that dream.”

These conversations-starters always end up with the other person telling me all about their aunt that knits or that their wife has always wanted to sell her underwater-woven baskets. And then I can say, “That’s so cool! I’m always meeting crafters! Would you mind letting her know about me?” as I hand them my business card.

2. Extend an invitation.

Michael Port calls it having an “always-have-something-to-invite-them-to-offer” (I’m not kidding, he uses all those dashes). Havi calls it having multiple circles. I call it giving them something to DO.

The important thing is that this thing you ask them to do with have super-low barriers to entry. It will be free. It will be easy to do. It will be completely free of commitment.

We are NOT trying to sell them something. We’re trying to get them to get to know us (and how we can help them) a little better.

Some examples?

If the conversation at a networking even is going great, don’t just hand them your business card (which, I assure you, will end up in the bottom of their purse coated in cookie crumbs and receipts); hand them an invitation to your free workshop.

If the shopper in your booth looks interested, don’t wait for her to buy something; tell her that signing up for your newsletter will snag her 10% off her purchase today and regular emails full of behind-the-scenes goodness.

This something to do could be:

• attending  a free event – online or in-person (hand them all the details they need!)
• scheduling a coffee date to talk further
• signing up for your newsletter (then you can wow them with your online awesomeness)
• anything else that gets them to connect with you again!

3. Remember: ALL awesomeness is a reflection of your TRUE awesomeness.

That fabulous website or charming Twitter persona? It’s YOU, through and through.
Online and offline, you are reaching your people and attracting clients that appreciate your you-ness. There’s no trick, no magic solution: you just bring that, the true you-ness. And  you will click with the right people.

If you do, you’ll find yourself happily out of your pjs and meeting people.

How do you bring your awesomeness offline? Tell me in the comments!

Tara Swiger is crafting a business , making eco-friendly yarn at Blonde Chicken Boutique and helping people craft their own ideal business, when she’s not busy being awesome online and off.

Hooray for Guest Post Wednesday and the fantabulous Kirsty!

photo credit: rharrison

Want to know why I opened an online shop for my art and then a consulting service just a few weeks later?

I’d been working on changing my money mindset for months. I’d heard that setting up lots of different income streams was a pretty smart thing to do. Plus Catherine had been brow-beating me gently nudging me into consulting.

But none of those are the real reasons.

No, the real reason is that I’d started describing myself as “an artist & purveyor of mad obsessive projects’ and the pedantic part of my brain (which is most of it!) was niggling at me. Every single time I used the phrase, a little voice piped up, “hey, you can’t call yourself a purveyor unless you’re selling something…”

Now, I adore the word ‘purveyor’. It makes me think of Victorian merchants with handlebar moustaches and fabulous old-fashioned adverts a page long.

photo credit: makelessnoise

I didn’t want to take it out of my description. Purveyor worked. It made people laugh. It was memorable, catchy and I loved it.

Clearly the only reasonable solution was to start selling something as quickly as possible.

So I did, even though I wasn’t quite ready for either endeavour.

Words have power. The way we describe ourselves can change our behaviour. What wonderful title can you give yourself that you’ll be forced to live up to? Tell us in the comments!

Kirsty Hall is an artist & purveyor of mad obsessive projects with a free resource page to help artists and other creative people to get online.

Hooray for Guest Post Wednesday and new guest poster Ben!

photo credit: Steve Keys

I have a bugbear. Something that pricks me and annoys me. Irritates me. Like someone scratching a blackboard. Enough sometimes to make the red mist descend and send me into an apoplexy of tempestuous rage.

Camera adverts.

Will you bite?

Great!

To me, camera adverts are a horrid manifestation of snake-oil salesmanship. The kind of salesmanship that manufactures a problem for which their product is a solution, rather than designing a solution to a problem which actually exists. These adverts often take the same form; a professional photographer, clickety-click, beautiful results. Hmmm. I work with pro photographers in the day job. I know how hard they have to work to create such beautiful photos.

So if you’re a professional or dedicated photographer then you probably need that stuff.

But for the rest of us?

You might be a blogger, a writer, a creative businessperson who wants to produce the most awesome content you can without a massive investment of money and time. (And without carrying twenty pounds of camera everywhere!) To me, creativity is spontaneous, random. If you’re the same then perhaps you’d like to express your creativity anywhere, any time.

Also you might not want to spend hundreds or more on an overpowered single function device whose full capabilities you’ll never really use.

I believe it’s possible to do more with less. I’ve subsumed over £1000 of equipment I used to own into… a smartphone.

The camera

I bet you’re already well on the way to making your phone your primary image-capture device. Ok, in terms of raw power a phone can’t compete with a DSLR but is it good enough? For me, totally!

Today’s smart phones are as powerful as desktop computers were not so long ago, so what you lack in raw resolution you can make up for in flexibility. Typically this means manipulating photos on your phone with apps and creative ways of unleashing the result on the outside world. I’ll not go through the thousands of photography apps available beyond telling you what’s blown my mind. I know and understand my iPhone 3GS so that’s what I’ll focus on but the same principle applies if you’re using any modern smartphone.

Best Camera
* Can be used in lieu of the standard camera app for taking photos.
* Gorgeous and simple editing capabilities.
* Fantastic integration with social networking sites.

Hipstamatic
* Can also be used instead of the standard camera app but I prefer to launch it for fun shots or where I don’t expect to do any editing (it’s that good).
* Strong integration with Flickr and Facebook.

JotNot Scanner
* Honorary mention; a replacement for a desktop scanner
* I use it to scan receipts and correspondence which can then be emailed as PDFs.
* If you only scan a few pages a day this could save you a lot of money and space.

Something I look for in apps is the ease with which you can get your work off the phone and into a project. Social network integration, the ability to save to your photo library and to email are key features that really come into their own when we look at video.

Camcorder

I don’t use any additional apps for video recording. Typically they’re small YouTube-length clips of friends and family acting like crazy fools. Again, the capabilities of my phone are good enough 99% of the time.

Video is where cloud-based services come into their own. I have much love for MobileMe and DropBox. Not only are they so simple and pervasively convenient but they can be used to store stuff to be actioned later or used to present your finished work to others. Very cool and nary a USB cable in sight. Unlike Flickr, YouTube etc. which seem best only at presentation.

Can this be generalised?

I’ve picked on photography and video as demanding but fairly logical examples of how to save money on multiple devices by converging their functions onto one. There are a few general ideas behind this method which might help you converge your tools:

Disregard techie features

For most people, gigahertz, megapixels and gigabytes are completely irrelevant. Ignore the language of systems and don’t let yourself get bamboozled into spending more money because a given device has a more impressive spec. It’s how these features are implemented that matters. Do they allow you to achieve a great workflow? Most single function devices suck at this.

Think about your processes, not about your systems

Systems and technology are fleeting. Keeping your systems up to date can be a time-consuming, expensive and fruitless process. Its the processes you achieve on those systems that count.

It’s easier with information.

You can do awesome stuff by converging processes that involve the manipulation and output of information. Think guitar tuner, recipe books, task management. Cloud-based services adds another dimension of brilliant to these kinds of processes by making it so much easier to send them to the outside world.

I hope this has given you some ideas on how to save money, ease your creativity and reduce your device footprint. I’d love to hear your thoughts. How could you apply this to what you do?

Ben Elijah writes about the creative process on his brand new blog, Unformation. He’s also trying to be the author of a novel and an ebook.

Hooray for Guest Post Wednesday and Gareth!

The universe is a great teacher. It has an endless amount of lessons that it is willing to teach you. The only problem is that it’s not all that selective. It’ll teach you lessons you’re ready for, lessons you’re not ready for, and lessons that you’ve forgotten and need to relearn. Now, I’m not always the most attentive student, so often, I need to be shown something multiple times in order for it to sink in, and well, The universe obliges there too. These are the seven most important lessons I’ve learned about starting and running anything online.

photo credit:

Lesson 1 – It’s hard work

This cannot be emphasised enough. The amount of work required to get something off the ground is massive. If you’re lazy, stick with the day job. If you can’t self motivate, stick to the day job. If the thought of going to bed at 02:00 after a call and getting up at 04:00 and being shiny and perky for another one terrifies you, stick to the day job. But, here’s the thing. if you’re doing something you love, the long hours don’t feel that long. You’re happy getting up at 04:00 as you’re excited to help the next person. It’s hard work, but it doesn’t always feel like hard work, and those are the days you have to live for, and, 99% of the time, you can sort your schedule out so that those 4AM mornings happen infrequently.

Lesson 2 – It’s scary as hell

Part of the whole “being authentic” that people love to throw around is putting yourself out there. You open up to people, you allow them to catch glimpses of who you really are. Sometimes, you reveal things that you weren’t even aware of. And you’re going to get criticised. You’re going to offend people. You’re going to have to learn that sometimes, you aren’t going to please anyone, and you still have to get up the next day and do it all over again.

And that’s not even touching on the whole “no steady paycheck thing”. Fortunately, Catherine has a kick-ass product to help you manage all that fear . (If you haven’t checked it out, you need to. It’s kick ass and promotes cage matches)

Now the lesson you’re supposed to learn here is that the fear is good. Fear tells you you’re moving. And while you may not be moving in the right direction, at least the feedback you get from the scenery changing can allow you to change course.

Lesson 3 – It’s hard work

Like I said, sometimes, I’m a little dense. I used to think the height of wit was a sign saying “Hard work never killed anyone, so why should I be the first” I lived by this motto, which is why I suspect this lesson needed to be given to me again. My superpower/kryptonite used to be “procrastination excuse generation”. I can probably come up with 15 different rational believable excuses for 12 different projects every day. It took me a while to realise that no matter how good the excuses were, it wasn’t the procrastination that people were reading. They were reading the articles I wrote while not procrastinating. I wasn’t getting any traffic from procrastination on other sites, the guest posts needed to be there. You have to knuckle down and do the work, otherwise…

Of course, I haven’t completely lost touch with the superpower. It still gets lots of practice at the day job.

Lesson 4 – Being a solopreneur is lonely

It’s amazing how few people get it. You can have a succesful business with a couple of hundred true fans. Even the most popular sites only have 100 000 subscribers. That’s 100 000 people out of 6 000 000 000. What this means is that 1 in 60 000 people will understand how you’re going to make a business out of this, if you’re lucky. That means that if you’re standing in a football stadium full of people, 1 of them is going to get it. And that 1 is you.

To counter this, you need to seek out like-minded individuals who do get it. Fortunately, the power of technology comes to your rescue. No longer do these awesome people need to be in the same city as you. They don’t even need to be on the same continent. Your best bet here is forums. Forums are great. Often they are built up around similar interests, so straight away you’ve got something in common. Some of them are composed entirely of “people who get it” and these are worth their weight in bytes.

Once you’ve found your circle, start talking to them. Comment on each others posts, do whatever it is you do on facebook (I don’t get facebook), talk. Some of your problems will already have been solved by others. Some of your issues melt away when compared to other peoples and most importantly, everyone has weird issues about something. So, while you may not have the same issues, it’s always nice to have someone say to you “you’re being an idiot, it’s not like the internet police are going to put up yellow hazard tape across your site with ‘Caution, boring content inside’ emblazoned on it in black” (although, I would kill to have that job)

P.S. if you don’t want to go out and search for an awesome group, just sign up for the awesome chat sessions.

Lesson 5 – Comparisons is not a fun game (unlike Monopoly)

The surest way to find the Dragon is to compare yourself to other people. Trying to get the same number of subscribers as Copyblogger, or the same number of Twitter followers as darthvader or real_hulk is a recipe for failure and discouragement. The only person that you are allowed to play comparisons with is past you. In fact. do this now. Go to your calender and set up a meeting in 2 months time with an automatic reminder. In the meeting, put a list of the metrics you use, facebook fans, twitter followers, monthly views, words written, anything you track, and the current values for all of them. Then forget about it. In 2 months, the reminder pops up, and you have a list of Past You things to compare yourself to. You’ll be amazed how things change.

Lesson 6 – It’s Hard Work

I keep on having to learn this one. It’s kind of a battle of wills between myself and the universe. And while I have, how does my wife phrase it, vast amounts of bloodyminded pigheadedness, I think the universe is going to win this one. If it didn’t want me to work hard, I would already have won the lottery.

Lesson 7 – Know your motivation cycles

My motivation cycles go up and down more often than Sisyphus. When I’m on an upswing, I can push that boulder up the hill like its a frictionless plane in space. When I’m on a downswing, I can’t even crawl down the hill to fetch the boulder. Because I am aware of this I know that I need to get breathing space while motivated. I need to pull some extra posts together, get some guest post slots in the future that I can write during the upswing and genreally be superproductive. All so that when I’m on the down swing I can sit and play puzzle pirates and not worry about having to work.

You need to learn what works best for you. Perhaps you can write 12000 words of a resource in one weekend, but then it takes 4 weeks to write the remaining 4000. Perhaps you can consistently write 1500 words a day that are your best work. There’s no best way here, there’s just a best way for you. Find it, learn it and make sure you take it into account before committing to things.

Lesson 7 – It’s hard work, but it’s worth every blood filled drop of sweat.

Yes it’s hard work, and yes, I did have to have that lesson beaten into me with repeated Dragon encounters, but there’s nothing like it. It’s uplifting, energising, rewarding, and just plain Awesome. Just ask Catherine.

Well, that’s all the lessons that have actually sunk in. I’m sure there are more out there. Let me know what you’ve learned in the comments.

Gareth is a slow learner which explains why he gets beaten up by the Dragon so often. You can follow his percussive learning process over on Fight Mediocrity.

Hooray for Guest Post Wednesday and Susan!

Those of us who write, interact and generally hang out on the web know that it’s entirely possible to show just the parts of us that we want seen and hide the rest.

And, of course, no one will ever know because you’re not face to face, right?

Actually… not quite.

photo credit: » Zitona «

We humans are a perceptive bunch

Have you ever seen a movie from the 1950′s where a door to door salesman scams a pretty housewife with a bad deal on aluminum siding? You were probably aghast thinking “How could she NOT see right through that?!”

It’s a great example of how much more perceptive we’ve become in the last several decades. I don’t have a lot of raw data for you on this, I just see the evidence all around me that our consciousness is evolving.

It’s common for us to talk today about intuition, authenticity and transparency, but you would never have heard those terms 40 years ago.

I call this our “spidey-sense” and I truly believe that this ever increasing ability to “feel” who people are and where they’re coming from is a big part of why we can be so comfortable interacting online.

When empathy joins the party, not much is hidden

OK, next TV analogy! Remember Counsellor Deanna Troi from Star Trek: The Next Generation? For those of you who don’t, she was a very important advisor to the captain because of one main ability – she was an “empath” or someone who could easily perceive the underlying feelings of others.

The captain would receive a message from some new species they’d never encountered before and then he would always turn the video screen off and turn to Counsellor Troi for her assessment before responding.

And her advice would be based on whether the things they were saying outwardly matched what they were thinking and feeling underneath it.

If they didn’t match, she would usually respond with “I don’t trust him.”

This sensory match-up is the essence of authenticity.

And this is what your people are looking for.

When my company The Heart’s Voice first began in January 2000, it was all about helping people speak from their hearts. And so I coached a number of speakers in how to reach their audience by being really authentic.

You see, I’ve been an empath since I was a child and I’ve always had the same ability that Deanna Troi had. So in listening to these speakers, I knew right away when something didn’t match up.

But what was really fascinating, was that I came to understand that their audience always knew when they were “off” as well, but they didn’t always know it consciously.

Mismatches lead to mistrust

We don’t always know exactly what’s “off” when we’re evaluating a person, product or website, but there’s something in us that tells us to pause – a little red flag in our gut that starts to wave before we go ahead and make a decision or a purchase.

What I noticed in those audiences was that the more mismatches there were from the speaker, the less trust and connection they had with their audience.

And that always led to fewer sales, fewer sign-ups or fewer good contacts made.

So how does this apply to an awesome website?

Your people are reading your matches and mismatches just like a speaker’s audience and they’re going to come away with a decision about whether they trust you or not.

They might be getting mismatched cues from your site design – like loud colours paired with a soft message or too many mixed font types. (A good reason to have awesome guidance in this area if you need it!)

Or it might be something more subtle.

When you’re hiding they can feel it.

We all have a list of things we think we can’t ever share without people running screaming from the room (or from their computers) horrified at our weirdness.

It might be your ‘too edgy’ sense of humour or your ‘too out-there’ love of the mystical or the fact that you’re a big softy when you’re supposed to be a hard-nosed negotiator.

But when you feel the need to hide those things, that creates a tension in you – a need for control and self-censorship, always watching to make sure you don’t let something slip.

And that tension is felt by others.

They won’t know why your page doesn’t feel right, they just won’t feel a lot of ease and flow in reading it because you weren’t feeling much ease when you wrote it, what with all that hiding!

It’s actually that quirky stuff they want from you.

It’s the paradoxes that make you interesting… and human. The stuff that seems like it can’t possibly fit together. Like ‘softy’ and ‘hard-nosed negotiator’ or ‘delightful’ and ‘weirdo’.

That’s the essence of an authentic brand.

But almost everyone I’ve ever helped to find their authentic ‘voice’ or brand had to overcome their resistance to it before they could really share it with the world.

We each have an aversion to sharing things about us that weren’t fully welcomed by others at various times. That’s where the impulse to hide comes from.

But when you relax and let your quirky hair down, you’ll discover a joy and ease that just naturally leads to better connections and more trust with your right people.

What authentic parts of yourself would you reveal if you KNEW they would be 100% welcomed?

If you’re not sure, ask a few trusted friends and loved ones about your authentic yet quirky qualities.

Ask about 10 of them and you might start to see a pattern! Then see if you can embrace those things fully and start to let them show.

We’d love to hear your thoughts on this in the comments below.

And if you dare, use this as place to safely come out of hiding and let us know what delightful weirdness you want to start showing!

Susan Johnstone, at The Heart’s Voice, creates magic and movement wherever desires meet obstacles. She specializes in changing procrastination, self-sabotage, hiding and resistance of all kinds.

Hooray for Guest Post Wednesday and Alexia!

You are a small business owner. You don’t have squillions of dollars to spend on broadcast advertising on TV and newspapers and radio. But you do have a website.

Are you taking it seriously?

Here are 5½ signs that you aren’t.

photo credit: kevindooley

1. You host your entire web site (not just the blog) on WordPress.com or Blogger

I already have a post about this, but things are best learned through repetition: using WordPress.com or Blogger or any other hosted blog service may seem like an awesome deal. Free is an awesome deal. For high schoolers and hobbyists, perhaps, but you are a business. You are professional (note: professional doesn’t mean stuffy).

Nothing says “I don’t care about my web site” like hosting it with a free service.

Not only are you at the mercy of the service—for instance, WordPress.com doesn’t like affiliate marketers, and the other services have their own Terms & Conditions that allow them to yank your site without warning—but you have way less flexibility regarding how it looks and than you would if you hosted your own site. You also don’t have control over your domain name (See Item 1½ below). And if WordPress or Blogger decide to ever stop offering free sites, you’re up the creek…

Shell out the $5/month for a good web host and install WordPress or get someone else to do it for you (like me!). It’s never a bad thing to invest in your business. Think of the tax deductions.

1 ½. You don’t have your own domain name

This is sort of a half because it goes with point #1. If you go with a hosted blog service, your web address looks like http://myawesomebiz.wordpress.com.

You don’t have a real address that reads:

My Awesome Business at Snerdly's
(Mr. Snerdly down the way is graciously letting me use this
space in exchange for his name being plastered everywhere)
225 Snerdly St.
Snerdly, SN 39SNRD

So why have a domain name that advertises that you don’t own your own space on the web?

This is a no-brainer. Less than $10/year can secure your very own domain name. I suggest NameCheap.com or Godaddy.com.

2. Your entire site is in Flash

Flash is sooo 2000.

Industries that are notorious for unusable, auto-play-music-laiden, torturously slow to load Flash sites:
Restaurants.
Artists.
Photographers.

Dudes, there is a better way! Really.

You can have all the slick graphics you want without forcing people to listen to Canon in D and sit through l-0-n-g slideshows. Or make people who are out and about on iPhones or non-flash-enabled mobile devices curse when they can’t see your menu. Not to mention, folks can find you with Google! And people can link directly to that mind-blowingly awesome photo you took of those trees!

And the best part? You can edit your site yourself. Quickly. Without having to go into flash and tweak/add/move one tiny thing and then re-export… Or worse: you have to leave it as it is because your web guy has fled to Cuba with the mounds of money you paid for that site.

Come a little ways into this decade. Sites that look good and allow you to edit stuff as you need to and will finally get that search engine traffic you deserve are easy to create. Look no further than WordPress. Did I mention that I can help with that?

3. You have a blog but the last post was six months ago

(related: your contact information is out of date, your copyright statement says 1999, you have “coming soon” or “under construction” badges with those cute little workmen on your site…)

Nothing is sadder than a neglected blog. Except, possibly, for an abandoned kitten.

If you know the benefits of a blog and like to write and can keep up with it along with your other business responsibilities, then go for it. If not, find someone who knows your business and hand it off to them or don’t blog.

You can gasp now.

Instead, use the blog portion of your site as a “news” or “specials” page and for the love of all that is good on the web, don’t use it as your front page.

That said, the benefits of blogging are well worth looking into. Search engines love fresh content. It’s a way to engage your customers on a more regular basis. Blogging also shows people you’re an expert, and gives you a platform to spread your message, your movement and find your right people.

4. No one can figure out what you do, even after clicking the “About” page

I can’t tell you how many “corporate” sites I’ve stumbled on that have slick looking graphics and smiley people in business suits but after 5 minutes on their site (I’m a little persistent when I want to be) I can’t figure out what it is they do.

How are people going to know what you do if you don’t tell them in plain english?

Think about it this way: how long do you spend on a web site looking for what it’s about? Three seconds? Five? If you don’t find the information quickly, you leave, right? Because you have better things to do than sit around and hunt for information that should be front and center.

Your site visitors are exactly the same.

Add a tagline to your site’s header. Something that says in a few words exactly what it is you do. Avoid jargon like the plague. Make sure a 9-year-old can understand it. Mine is “WordPress Coaching and Consulting for the Terminally Busy.” Be Awesome Online’s, of course, is “Website advice for delightful weirdos”.

5. You use jargon, industry-speak and stilted business language in your copy

You are human. Act like one. Write like one.

Forget everything you learned in school about writing “proper” English. Business writing is for people in suits who push around seventy gazillion dollars at a time and don’t need to explain what it is they do.

But you are a very small business. And you interact with your customers one-on-one. And they need to know you’re a real person. They need to see your personality because that’s what draws them to you.

And forget about serving “everyone” or being afraid of turning off people just because you are real in your web copy. The people who most resonate with what you say and what you do and how you say it will be the most awesome, amazing and grateful customers you ever have. So be yourself.

If I ruffled your feathers or stepped on your toes or harassed/bothered/annoyed you in any other way, I did my job. I want to see you be the best you can be not only in your own local area where you do business, but on the web, too.

So… if any of these 5 ½ points is you, what are you going to do about it? Tell us in the comments!

It’s Guest Post Wednesday, and here’s Ali!

Quick mental fixes have always seemed a little cheap. I mean come on, how much can a blog post really help? How does putting more stuff in our head help us sort it out?

Well here’s another very simple idea to keep you on the ball, moving and fearless, despite the waves of confusion the universe may be showering you with. (Money back guarantee!)
You’ve probably read “do the most important things first” over and over – but if you’re as muddled as me, you’ll be confused about your priorities a lot of the time.

List the most important points about what you’re doing, and why and how you’re doing it. Update them over time as your direction changes, or you improve your strategy.

Three by three

A neat way to get this together is in a 3 x 3 format.

For example I made three categories with three points each that would be just about right to inspire me at a glance.

Having them written down at my working area would mean I can look to them for ideas when I begin to feel less on-top-of-things than I need to be.

Mess with it

Of course you can change the categories and the number, but I think three things is manageable – and also requires some prioritizing which is the point of the whole thing.

For example

So here’s what I’ve come up for, for myself. Because at the moment I’m focussed on building my microbusiness, two of the three categories relate to that.

Life: three most important goals

• spiritual /personal development (I write about this stuff at AliStarbright.com)
• financial independence
• healthy marital relationship (my god I just realized how intertwined these three are)

Business: three important strategies

• blogging (AND guest posting in equal measures)
• contacting brick-and-mortar local businesses
• (obviously I need to put more thought into this one)

Business: three most important projects

• video for website introducing website products
• writing and designing promotional materials (my eternal bane)
• creating solid documentation and processes to make life pleasant for future clients

Last minute addition: future projects

• start the consulting service
• make a product that really helps startup soloists take their first steps

Make your own

Make your own. If you have trouble, take a look at some vital questions Catherine asked.

Make it move

I’ve changed these since yesterday which is good – I’m thinking about it and refining my plan. Edit and refine yours as much as you need – this means you’ll not only be on the ball but on your way to scoring with it.Care to share your own 3x3s? What categories did you choose and why? Struggle to fill any out? I tried pretty hard to fill out three business strategies – an area that needs more consideration.
Or, do you use another technique to stay productive and motivated that the rest of us would benefit from? See you in the comments!

Ali Dark empowers people to offer their passion to the world. He hosts and designs websites and blogs for entrepreneurs,solists and freelancers. Join his mailing list for blogging and microbusiness insights.

Just watch out for that corny tagline.

Photo by LucasTheExperience