I have to admit that I haven’t read Eat Pray Love yet, and yet is the key word because it’s on my list after watching that talk.

I love the idea of separating the genius from the person. Who wouldn’t want a magical fairy or an invisible house elf there to help you through tough creative blocks or even pick your spirits up when you were down. I don’t think for one minute that I haven’t done the time or put in the work to make my business work or my family happy, but it’s nice to think that if things aren’t going picture perfect sometimes it’s just because Dobby the house elf is sitting down on the job.

I know that I have sat in the presence of something more than myself when it comes to my creative life. Unfortunately it hasn’t come in the form or an international best selling book but it did show up one night at a band concert. It was as though everything aligned and I couldn’t play a wrong note even if I tried. After that night it was hard to realize I wasn’t going to go on to make millions in an orchestra because the next day I was back to my regular mediocre self.

That moment on stage was a special moment but it was just for me. No one else knew what I was feeling and probably no one noticed that I totally rocked that concert! Having those moments to yourself is important because it boosts yourself up without relying on anyone to do it for you. Just knowing that for one minute I was capable of perfection has pushed me to try new and great things.

I took away from that the realization that there are moments in life that define who you are and there are moments where you are more than what you thought you were to help push you forward. Being motivated from within (with or without Dobby the house elf’s help) is important to moving forward with those big projects you have on the horizon. Being motivated doesn’t take the fear away or the what ifs that creep into your thought process when you’re working on a project but it definitely ads a bumper.

Now that the summer is almost over I’ve realized that I’m kind of addicted to e-courses, e-books and workshops because currently I have over 20 different courses and e-books that I’ve accumulated over the first part of the year!

Photo found on Flickr

I promise that I had every intention of working through each one but life tends to get in the way and I just never got around to them…

I have a plan though!

Now that I’m starting to get that itchy “I must start something new!” feeling that us Renaissance Souls seem to get, I’m working on a plan of attack for all these courses.

I broke them into categories* to make them easier to work through:

Lifestyle

Blogging

Marketing

Business Growth

The plan is to start tackling them one by one and log my progress here for all you lovely people to see!

Awesome for me because I finally get to work through all these awesome courses and e-books and have someone to be accountable to to get them done!

Awesome for you because you’ll get some insider extended reviews of some great programs that you can decide to use to grow your business as well! I’ll also be sharing which program or ebook I’m working through in case you want to join me!

Let me know if you have any e-courses, workshops or e-books that you think would be a good fit and I’ll take a look and maybe review them here on the blog!

Hurray for a new adventure!

*Categories may be changed or expanded upon due to the fact that I am extremely indecisive…

Ok so it’s 11:07pm on a Wednesday night and I am kind of POed right now. Some of you may know that I spend an unhealthy amount of a large amount of productive time on Facebook and have really grown to love it for my business and for my private life. But then came the changes…

• The several different revamps of the Home page. (Really, we need an extra sidebar and for you to hide all of the information and links I use on a regular basis? Nothing like fixing something that’s not broken.)
• The addition of the News feed and the Most Recient feed. (Really? You think you know what I want to look at better than I do? Maybe Facebook has psychic robot dogs that can just tell what I absolutely need to see; and in that case I need one of those robot dogs.)
• The sneaky changing of the “privacy” policy. (I had no idea advertisers were so interested in people’s high school photos or the mobile uploads from last nights bar crawl. Interesting…)
• “Liking” instead of “Fanning” a page. (I have no witty remarks. This is just dumb.)

All of these are unsettling but I was able to look past it because I loved Facebook.

• I love catching up with old friends and finding new friends.
• I like being able to post pictures and videos for said friends to comment on.
• I love the fact that I have the option of being a virtual farmer or a mob boss from the comfort of my own home. (I have done neither of those things.)

Today Facebook may gone too far…

I discovered (via Twitter) a forum post that states that Fan Pages no longer have the option of directing new visitors to a custom landing tab.

*Insert verbal diarrhea here*

Here’s the post:

Seriously?! 10k fans?! I was excited when I hit the 100 mark and got my vanity URL! I’m not saying I suck or anything but I’m not vain enough to think that I am going to acquire 10,000 anytime soon! (This is were you start the letter writing campaign to get me the 10k fans. Hint Hint Nudge Nudge)

This is a stab in the back to all the small business owners on Facebook who have spent time and money to create custom FBML tabs for their visitors. I offer this service to my clients because it’s a great way to really show a new visitor what yout Facebook Fan page is all about and what they can expect if they Fan Like your page.

This has really put a bee in my bonnet.
(Here’s where you envision me very angry about, first of all wearing a bonnet, and second of all finding a bee inside said bonnet.)

I bet MySpace is just loving this…

*End of Rant*

*Update: (5/20) Facebook seems to have noticed a few unhappy customers and has changed the landing options back to the way they were. You’re landing tabs should work now. Your welcome.

Sure I’m happy about this but I can’t help but to envision their thought process…

Hey! Maybe we change something huge on our platform and then see if anyone gets upset! Then when they’re all ready to leave we say, “Awww, baby we were just playin. Come on back now and give Facebook some suger!”

Found via Etsy by BroadwayInspired

When I thought about the topic of Memory, I immediately thought of the movie Momento. This movie in a nutshell, Leonard is troubled with extreme short term memory loss after the murder of his wife. He remembers his life by taking polaroids of important people and things in his life and by getting tattoos of his most important thoughts. The movie is filmed in reverse, where the first scene is actually the last fame of the movie and we unravel the mystery throughout the movie.

I love this movie for several reasons but the one I’d like to share is the idea that our memories make us who we are and that what we remember really affects what we become in the future. If you only remember the bad times and the hurtful times and the angry times then that is what you are going to become.

Don’t allow yourself to have selective memory.

Bad stuff happens to everyone and we have all been let down at one point or another in our lives but to give up writing because of a few back reviews or to stop trying to grow your business because you didn’t get the client you wanted is not the way to move forward.

Choose to remember the good times.

Remember the way it felt when you stepped out onto the stage and everyone cheered for you! Remember the first time your daughter smiled at you! Remember the first dollar you made in your own business!

Keep a good mix of the good and bad memories because both will remind you to be the best person you can be and to remember those times that you were the best and how great that felt.

This post is a part of Momalom’s Five for Ten series!

Art by artzink found via Etsy

Hmmmm, happiness… such an interesting topic for me. I go through waves of happiness every so often but most of the time I’m just working really hard to stay sane!

Things that get in the way of us being happy:

Long work hours, either because someone else thinks we need to or we make ourselves think we need to.

The weather affects us more than we like to let on. It’s cloudy and dreary, I’m cloudy and dreary. (I do love thunderstorms though…weird.)

The biggest one is our Vampires. Ok I know what your thinking but these ones aren’t glittery or look anything like Brad Pitt. My friend and coach Michelle Ward has a great blog post on how to she realized she needed to kill her Vampires! I totally think I still have a few wandering aimlessly in my head sucking the life out of my happy thoughts!

“You can’t run a successful business, be a good mom AND have a clean house!”

“No one is going to read your blog posts so why even bother writing them!”

“You don’t deserve to be happy.”

So, what’s the solution. Well that’s up to you! Figure out what your Vampires are telling you and then decided not to listen to them. Yup, it’s that easy.

Ok so maybe not EASY but that’s what needs to happen. You can also get help by telling your girlfriends what your Vampires are saying and then watching them laugh at how wrong your Vampire is and then telling you how awesome you are while you all drink margaritas!

Enjoy this Vampire hunting song. It’s a bit R rated but what else would you expect from a Vampire hunting song?! Go kill those Vampires and write that novel, paint that painting and finish that other project that you know will make you happy!

This post is a part of Momalom’s Five for Ten series!

Samwise Gamgee was the real hero of The Lord of the Rings Trilogy. I’m just going to throw that our there.

Don’t believe me?

Sam is the hero because he just wanted a normal life but because he loved his friend so much he was willing to give up a normal life to help Frodo with his quest. J.R.R. Tolkien even said that he considered Sam the “chief hero” of his saga.

That is courageous in my book. Sam went up against monsters and pure evil and had several chances to turn back and run away but he didn’t; he stayed with Frodo until the end. He didn’t go into it thinking “Hey I’ll go throw this ring in Mount Doom and save the world then maybe we’ll go have a pint down at the pub. No biggie.” Ummm, no. He basically was scared 99.9% of the time; but he stayed and he finished anyway.

Courage isn’t something that we are born with, it’s something we earn and discover about ourselves.

I don’t think you can just wake up one day and go “I think I’ll start being courageous today!” It takes something extraordinary in ourselves to realize that we are scared to do that big project that needs done – and then we do it anyway.

Just because you don’t fight monsters or save the world on a normal basis doesn’t mean your not courageous.

Courage means:

An artist who puts their work up for other people to love or criticize.

A mom who quits her job to stay at home to be with her daughter.

A woman who leaves the corporate world to start up her own business.

An author who sends out query letters again and again even after getting those nasty rejection letters.

How are you courageous?

This post is a part of Momalom’s Five for Ten series!

Have you ever wondered what happened to that rebel who wanted to start their own business and live the life they wanted? Maybe they got crushed by other people’s opinions or maybe they wanted to blend in and make their business just like everyone else’s because that’s what they thought they had to do (That was me…).This week Johnny B. Truant and Lee Stranahan have put out a new program called “Question the Rules” geared exactly for that purpose; to help you bring that crazy dreamer/rebel back and focus on making your business kick ass! Both guys are hilarious and genius in their marketing so it shouldn’t surprise anyone that this program is awesometastic!

Over the past few months I have been undergoing a transformation of not only my business but my mindset as well. As you might know I started my business as a Vanilla VA and planned to work with anyone and do anything that would bring in the money.  It took some time and some help from my coach to realize that I wasn’t Vanilla and I was not being true to myself. I am a wild and crazy awesome quirky person who also happens to be a kick ass Virtual Assistant! I chose to bring that to my business by rebranding and reexamining my marketing to include my quirky side in a professional way!

I am SO much more aware that what I think is “professional” – boring and stuffy – is fine for some people, but not for me. It took some times but I have gotten away from comparing myself to everyone and just living in my truth that I am a . This program has really cemented my philosophy that people will want to work with me because of ME not how many yellow highlighted text areas I have or how many cold calls I make! Of course you philosophy could be completely different and that’s ok; that’s kind of the point!

Johnny and Lee’s program takes it a step further though and goes into how to set goals that will actually work with my beliefs instead of focusing on what I “should” be working towards. My favorite section though is on networking outside of the box and how you can network yourself and your business without feeling like a creepy salesman which is my ultimate fear when surrounded by people at a networking event!

Right now they are launching the program at a crazy price break of $97 and after Saturday (5/1) it’ll jump up to its final cost of $397. So if you are ready to start putting some F-U-N into your business instead of boring and stuffy check out Question the Rules and starting running your business the way you want to! Being yourself and not playing by the rules could be the thing that makes you stand out and be memorable and ultimately get that sale or that new client!

Full disclosure, some of the links in this post are affiliate links but that doesn’t mean I’m a slimy salesman; I really LOVE this program otherwise I wouldn’t be telling you about it here!

I can’t remember the last time I was so energized to work on my business! It’s such a great feeling and I love all the great info and goals I have now because of the conference!

The opening and closing keynotes by Marsha Petrie Sue were great and really brought the conference full circle by getting me excited about my business! One of the quotes that I will be printing out and taping to my wall is “Is this the best use of my time right now?” I love this and really need to start thinking about that as I inadvertently spend an hour tweaking a blog post or getting sucked into Facebook!

Yvonne Weld had a great session on how to start attracting more clients by working on your systems and your follow through. There was a lot of information in that session that I’m still sifting through but it was a great reminder that just because I build it, doesn’t necessarily mean they will come! I need to do a better job of preparing before a meeting and then following up after a meeting. I tend to only worry about how scatterbrained I look during the meeting so preparing beforehand will really help me not be as nervous!

Karen Gridley led a session on embracing your rights and creating an excuse free life. The one point I liked was kind of a Duh moment, “Quit Taking It Personally.” I know that I have a big problem with this and will really be working hard at being ok with who I know I am and not taking it personally when Joe Sixpack doesn’t want to work with me.

Beth Caldwell did a session on success strategies that basically walked you through how to envision and go forward with your ideal business. One point I took away from the session was the idea to look at what my existing clients thank me for and use that to build and grow my business. It’s hard for me to say I’m an expert at X,Y and Z but by looking to my clients to basically tell me what I’m good at breaks me from feeling like I’m bragging; I’m simply building on how I’ve helped my clients in the past!

Sally Kuhlman and Yvonne Weld did an excellent joint session on whether your business is thriving or just surviving. They talked about a number of ways to jump start your business when you’ve gotten to the point where your don’t even want to talk to your clients because you’re so burnt out. Thankfully I haven’t gotten to that point yet but I did really appreciate the section on how to set good goals and to follow through with them. Goals are a hard thing for me to narrow down so getting that conversation started in my head has really gotten the creative juices moving for me and I have some great goals now that I’ll share with you in just a moment!

Alyssa Gregory did a fun session on work/life balance and even though her PowerPoint slides didn’t want to cooperate it was a great time! It turned into a brainstorming session on how to separate your work and family time and space. I definitely realized that I need to start getting more organized because that seems like the key to getting peace when working from how with a 17 month old! I got another great quote to add to wall as well, “Do What You Can and Can the Rest!” LOVE that!

Coming back from the conference I had a lot to think about and a lot of things I wanted to get done in the coming year. Here are a few of my goals for the rest of this year. Some are easier than others but hopefully by putting them out there I’ll be more inclined to work on them!

• Create worksheets and walkthroughs to help Creatives organize their thoughts
• Create and FAQ for my website
• Create a referral program
• Create a personal database of agents, publishers and other necessary posse members for authors
• Start writing articles and submitting them to online magazine
• Create a new focus towards social media and internet marketing assessments. I want to be more of a partner for my clients going forward!

I am so excited to see how much I can grow this year and to see where I am next year at the IVAA summit in Portland, Oregon!

The 9th annual IVAA conference was amazingly awesomtastic and I can’t wait to start moving on my business but I wanted to share some fun parts of the trip with you. As I began to write this post I realized that there were two major parts of the conference: the networking and friendship making part and the business growth and learning part. In some ways the two intertwined but I decided to split them up so that I didn’t end up with a ridiculously long post!

Part One: Fun and Friends

Image courtesy of CandyTX’s TwitPics!

Imagine you walk into a crowded room filled with men or women who are in the same business as you, they have the same ups and downs as you and they may all be just as crazy as you. That’s how I felt this past week at the IVAA Live Summit in Phoenix Arizona! I was so excited to meet all of these amazing women and realize I wasn’t the craziest one in the bunch! It was great to meet all of my friends that I had never met in person and even meet some new friends that I can’t believe I didn’t know before!

I’m not going to be able to recount every detail of the four days I was there but here are some of the highlights:

• Free drinks at the manager’s reception – Score!
• The convo pit where the wonders of the VA world were talked about and solved.
• The awesome omelet bar every morning. Seriously, a free cooked breakfast every morning. It was rather awesome.
• Dinner at Rustler’s Rooste and getting scared to death by “snake eggs” from Patty Dost – she’s not as nice as she appears but we love her anyway
• Dinner with the Online Summit team at Zinburger and watching Sherra Scott freak out the waiter by wanting to connect with him on Twitter and Facebook! He was a good sport but it still made us laugh uncontrollably for a good ten minutes! Good times…
• Getting to meet Jan King and some other Virtual Author’s Assistants at lunch one day – I might even get some SciFi clients out of it!
• Meeting Terry Green who literally lives 2 hours from me! Hurray for Ohio VAs!
• Meeting some of the great new VAs (Brenda Briley, Susana Sifuentes-Prieto, Theresa Nelson) there and helping them (I hope) by talking about how I started and what helped me during the first year.
• Getting cake from Justin Ryan of DuckDuckBlue for Administrative Assistants Day! It was SO yummy and a great way to get people downstairs at midnight!
• Update: I can’t believe I forgot to mention the Best roomates ever! Brenda Briley was so sweet and we had some great conversations over lunch and breakfast and even ended up on the same flight home! Cindy Opong is like a sister from another mother! We had way too much fun staying up until all hours of the night chatting about everything!

I know it sounds cliché but just being able to go and meet all of these amazing women and feel very included and part of the group has given me a confidence that I know is going to spill over into my business!

Next time we’ll discuss all the businessy business things I learned while at the conference and some ideas on where my business could be headed!

As you know I have switched up my marketing and business brand this year and it was a very scary thing for me to look outside of the box and not be like everyone else. Then I saw these new U by Kotex commercials. Freaking hilarious and SO right! Why does advertising have to be so unlike normal life? Lots of marketing campaigns are guilty of this; beer commercials, fast food commercials and even online marketing campaigns that promise big payoffs with their webinar series. Personally, I like to think that people work with me because of my personality and my hard work ethic, not on how long my sales page is or how many yellow highlighted areas I can fit into one paragraph! To me quality far out weighs quantity when it comes to business so I would rather have 5 amazingly awesometastic clients than 10 mediocre clients any day!

Marketing, whether you are selling a product, a service or just simple promoting your personal brand needs to come from a place of honesty or else your future clients aren’t going to buy what your selling; and if they do buy they won’t trust you completely.

So how do you find out if you are marketing in-authentically?

• Do you feel icky when you sign up a new client because you are promising things that you may not be able to deliver?

• Do you advertize only with the picture perfect, planets aligned kind of scenario?

• Do your friends think you should have grown up to be a used car sales man?

If you said yes to any of the above you are not a horrible person, you just need to take a step back and decide how you want to present yourself from now on!

Enjoy these videos and think about how you want to portray yourself out in the business world!