December 10, 2012

5 books worth giving

image by daysfalllikeleaves – click for more info

‘Tis the season for giving, and what better gift than a book? I prefer the old-fashioned kind that kills trees, but whether your recipients do digital or paper, here are my top read recommendations for this holiday season.

The Age of Miracles

for the fiction lover

One of the most captivating books I’ve encountered in a long time. This coming of age story is set into motion by a simple but provocative question: what would happen if the Earth’s rotation slowed? Answered through the eyes of young girl, this was my favorite read of the year.

 

The Female Brain 

for the science junkie, expectant parent, or human behavior enthusiast

Why do teenage girls talk on the phone so much? Why do baby girls look at faces more than baby boys? This book is a fascinating study of the female brain from in-utero through maturity. Also check out the companion book, The Male Brain.

Fascinate: Your 7 Triggers to Persuasion and Captivation

for entrepreneurial types

In a word? Fascinating! Sally Hogshead will change the way you see the world, and yourself, with this book. She outlines 7 fascination triggers and how they work in the world, from advertising to social behavior. And yup, she’ll even tell you how you fascinate.

 

The Four Agreements: A Practical Guide to Personal Freedom

required reading for all humans

Taken to heart, this book is a game changer. I love this one because the message is powerful and the suggestions effective, but it doesn’t read like a hippy-dippy self-help book. Very grounded.

 

Guardians of Being

for the animal lover

One of my all time favorite books to read and gift. A collaboration between Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now guy) and Patrick McDonnell’s (the MUTTS comics guy), this book is a gentle nudge towards being and presence. Who better to help with that than your favorite animal?

 

Do you have a reading recommendation to add to the this gift list? Please add them in the comments.

Gathering light,

 

Filed Under: Buy You, For You, Read & Play Tagged With: , 2 Comments
November 29, 2012

Grow Your Handmade Business: Benchmarks

The following is an excerpt from Kari Chapin’s new book, Grow Your Handmade Business. This fantastic guide has tons of excellent advice for starting and maintaining your business — and also features our very own Tara Gentile as well as many other much-loved entrepreneurs. Enjoy this chapter, and make sure you read to the end to find out how you can win your own copy of Kari’s book!

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Setting benchmarks is a good way to define what success looks like to you, and is an important step in the business-planning process. Success doesn’t always mean that you have accomplished everything you set out to do. It can look and feel like anything you want. Sometimes, if I just get two paragraphs written, I feel successful. Success can be fluid and changeable if that works for you. For me, if I feel good about what I’ve done during the day, with how I’ve spent my time, I feel successful. And that can go a long way.

Measuring Your Success

How do you measure your success? Since it has a lot to do with your intentions and goals, only you can decide what success looks like to you and your business. I’d like you to take your journal and look at one of your favorite intentions. (Perhaps it’s something like quitting your day job and working for yourself within the next year.) Now work on the goals underneath that intention, and then break a few of your goals down into tasks. If you complete a few of the tasks, you have come that much closer to reaching the goal, and you’re that much closer to realizing the intention, which means you’re being successful.

Another way to measure your success is to determine how you want to feel. Take some time and make a list of the feelings you want to experience from your business. Your list may look something like this:

  • Free
  • Self-reliant
  • Happy
  • Secure
  • Abundant
  • Creative
  • Exuberant
  • Accomplished

Check in with yourself from time to time. Is your business making you feel how you want to feel, which is to say, fulfilled? If so, you’re achieving your personal definition of success. Congratulations! If not, figure out why. What could you do to improve the state of your feelings?

From the Creative Collective

I focus on results. I think about the money, credibility, relief, excitement, or pride that I’m going to achieve or feel when I’m back on track. It’s not enough to think about the end goal; I need to be able to touch and taste every bit of the result. Once I do that, accomplishing things becomes easy.
– Tara Gentile

I have a yearly financial goal that I work into my spreadsheets on a monthly and annual basis (related to how far away I am to that target), and I came to that number by figuring what’s realistic to hit and raising it about 20 percent. That way I have something to reach for while still believing it’s not gonna take a parallel universe or a lottery win to get me to that number.
– Michelle Ward

Think Ahead

While you’re busy making that list of feelings, spend some time thinking about where you’d like your business to be in six months from now, one year from now, and then five years from now. I know. These are age-old questions, asked in many job interviews and by parents the world over, but there is a good purpose behind them. Thinking ahead will keep your planning muscles in shape. Once you take a good look at your long-term plans, you’ll see some intentions and goals take shape. Reviewing these monthly or quarterly or even yearly will help you know if you’re on track.

It’s important to measure your success because it’s necessary to know what’s working and what isn’t. If you have been pursuing a line, a project, or a service but you’re just not getting the results you want, it’s definitely time to reevaluate.

What Does Success Look Like?

Say one of your ultimate intentions is to become a gazillionaire. You want to be filthy, stinking rich. So you have an intention that looks like this:

I want to be a GAZILLIONAIRE!

Just because that gazillion dollars isn’t in your pocket right now, or likely won’t be even a year from now, doesn’t mean you aren’t successful. But ponder this: The more reasonable and easily attainable the financial goals you set for yourself are, the more successful you’ll be. For example, if your intention is to increase your profit by 15 percent over the next three months rather than, say, doubling it, chances are you’ll feel better about the direction your business is heading, and the boost you get when your intention is manifested will be huge.

From the Creative Collective

My plans for my business are almost completely driven by objectives. I believe in setting really spacious goals that allow for victory in “failure” and flexibility in “destination.” I create objectives around income, influence, experience, and personal freedom. I come up with goals by just concentrating on what I really want. Generating goals based on personal desire but grounded in community value will help you find the motivation you need to execute them.
– Tara Gentile

Exercise

Think about what success means to you. Really, really think about it. In your journal, write up a personal definition that you can return to again and again if you need or want to.

Likewise, think about what failure looks like to you. What would have to happen for you to feel like your business was failing? Write that down, too. If you ever feel like things are way off track, look back on your personal definition of failure. Compare it to what you’re going through. Chances are, according to your very own definition, your business is not failing.

Calculating Success One Step at a Time

Consider some areas of your business that can offer easily calculable success. As always, when trying out something new, you can make things easier on yourself by starting small. Setting small benchmarks, little check-in points, can assist you when you’re deciding if you’re on track or not.

Remember how I mentioned starting at the end, figuring where you want to be, and then working your way backward to the beginning? Let’s put that exercise into practice by imagining where you want to end up and then work backward to get there. We’ll use social media as an example. Let’s say you want to improve your social media connections, which ties into your marketing and sales. Specifically, you want to increase your followers on Twitter by a thousand people. So imagine that you’re already there, and then work backward toward where you actually are right now. By retracing your steps, so to speak, you’ll discover what you need to do to get to where you want to go.

Specific Steps

Here are some specific steps you can take, using social media as an example:

Intention
By the end of the year, I will increase my Twitter audience by 1,000 people.

Goals

  • Connect further with like-minded businesspeople by responding to their tweets more.
  • Post useful and relevant content.
  • Post links to my best blog posts.
  • Add a tweet button to my website so that others can tweet links from my site with ease.

Tasks

  • Ask a pal how they installed the tweet button on their website.
  • Follow the links others tweet, and retweet the best ones, as time permits.
  • When I’m reading new blogs, look for people’s Twitter links.
  • Connect more with people who follow me.
  • Respond to strangers when they communicate with me.

How Success Will Be Measured
Record my current number of followers, and increase the number by 25 percent every three months. I’ll notate my calendar as a reminder.

See? You set an intention and some goals, and then listed some doable tasks. Since you notated your calendar to check in with your intention in three months’ time, you can decide then if your tasks are really helping you reach your goals. After three months, you could decide that your intention was too ambitious for the amount of time you spend reaching out through social media. Or you may have already added those thousand Twitter followers. If so, you know that your intention has been met and so you are ready to set a new one.

From the Creative Collective

I’m usually focused on growth. How can I reach X number of subscribers to my blog, how can I hit X number of sales, and so on. I look at what’s possible, based on past statistics, then try to push myself to go a bit further.
– Nicole Balch

I set fresh intentions, raise my financial threshold, and revisit my service structures whenever I’ve hit a leaden blockade, either energetically or revenue-wise. During my first year as a full-time entrepreneur, I had to stop and recalibrate several times. Trial and error is a fussy, messy business. But that’s the nature of creating something out of nothing. Intelligent experimentation. These days things are ticking along much more elegantly. I’m no longer in perpetual “launch mode.” I feel grounded and graceful in my business. I suspect I’ll spruce up my master plan in six months or so. Or whenever I get hit with a bolt of brilliance that changes everything, all over again.
– Alexandra Franzen

Periodic Checkups

Periodically checking in on your progress is essential to your success. At regular intervals, look over your business plan, see what areas you’d like to monitor closely, and decide how you’d like to assess your progress.

Oftentimes people make things hard on themselves by reviewing things just once or twice a year or when things are going poorly. But if you set aside time to review your business plan every couple of months, you may well avoid some heartache and some pitfalls because you’ll be able to notice details and kinks before they become problems. Conversely, you’ll pick up on things that are working well that you may not have noticed, and maybe your next big idea will come from tracking your stats.

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Win a copy of this book!

One randomly chosen reader will receive a free copy of Grow Your Handmade Business by Kari Chapin. Leave a comment below and you’ll be entered! Winner will be announced on Friday, December 7, 2012 by 5:00 pm EST.

Filed Under: Buy You, For You, Dialogue Tagged With: , , 42 Comments
November 7, 2012

Tiny Beautiful Things

Someone yelled at me the other day. I don’t mean a shout to alert me to danger or even a short string of expletives. I mean someone spent several minutes of their precious life screaming at me on the phone while shifting with whiplash speed between potentially legitimate complaints, baseless ad hominem attacks, and plenty of stuff that was clearly about someone other than me. The details are neither important nor am I at liberty to share them. Getting yelled at seems to be sort of an occupational hazard: People apparently yell at their rabbis. I’ve asked around and, yes, it’s a thing.

So, of course, I’ve been telling myself all sorts of stories about this: replaying the “conversation;” imagining how I am supposed to interact with this person when next we meet; telling myself there must be things I am supposed to learn from this and supposing that the diatribe included kernels of truth if only I could sift them from the bitter chaff. None of this has helped.

What did help was this line from Cheryl Strayed’s storehouse of goodness, Tiny, Beautiful Things: Advice on Life and Love from Dear Sugar:

“I never believed the boys were angry,” she writes of young men she was working with as a youth advocate, “I believed they were hurt, and anger was the safest manifestation of their sorrow. It was the channel down which their impotent male rivers could rage.”

I heard these sentences and felt something release in my chest. Are there things I could still learn from the screamer (including how to excuse myself until they could talk to me more reasonably)? Yes. Are there grains of truth in the substance of the yelled words? Quite possibly. But Sugar’s story brought me round again to the base of compassion, the stronghold of love, from which I try to run this whole operation of my life. This person who yelled at me was in pain, and for them, too, “anger was the safest manifestation of their sorrow.”

Tiny Beautiful Things is a collection of Strayed’s “Dear Sugar” advice columns written for therumpus.net. I listened to the audio version of the book, which had the added advantage of letting me hear Strayed give voice to her own words. But the book is so well written that I’m sure the words would dance off the page and into your heart in any format.

In it, people write to Sugar for advice about relationships and art, drug abuse and their urges to hurt their children. And Strayed, as Sugar, weaves her advice to them with stories of her own life, experiences, poems, mantras that arise for her in response to the letters.

Sugar isn’t exclusively about loving people up no matter what, she also tells it like it is. Urging all of us darlings to take a good look at our words and our actions and from that vantage point to take responsibility for our part in our hardships and for our potential to live better lives and to be better people. And she does it all from a place of acknowledging that none of us is called upon to be super-human, but that all of us are called upon to be our truest selves.

This is also, as Strayed makes clear, where art comes from. She writes of a memoir-writing class she taught where she asked students to answer two deceptively similar questions about their own and their fellow students’ work: “What happened in this story?” and “What is this story about?” The raw materials, the facts, the eclectic inheritances of our lives are the starting point, but only the starting point, for the hard and wonderful task of making our work, our relationships, our whole lives meaningful. The willingness to distinguish between these two basic questions is the difference between making art and making a life or failing to do either.

Even facing this blank page, I was afraid that I would not find a way to do Sugar justice, to share with you a glimpse of what her work is truly about. But I was heartened, as I know you will be, by her voice of unending compassion and unflinching honesty. Go and listen, sweet peas.

Filed Under: Plot Notes, Read & Play Tagged With: , , 2 Comments
August 31, 2012

book review: The Small House Book

(I’m so excited to be writing a review of Chris Hayes’ Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy that I want to take another read of the book to distill all the awesomeness it contains. So I’m going to change my planned order and tell you about my latest obsession: tiny houses!)

I first learned about tiny houses from Tammy, the awesome voice behind Rowdy Kittens. Connecting first on Twitter, then on Instagram, I’ve been watching the evolution of her journey toward tiny home living from a distance, but with a keenness that could not be denied. Luckily, my local public library had a copy of The Small House Book by Jay Shafer so I could do some research in my favorite fashion: good old books.

Thinking about tiny houses comes just a few weeks after I moved from one bedroom in our house to a new, significantly smaller, bedroom. At the time, I didn’t realize the size differential. I hadn’t planned on culling and shrinking my belongings quite so quickly. But once I got the major pieces of furniture into my new room (bookcase, bed, desk, and armchair), I felt like there was just too much stuff.

What if the things I thought I needed aren’t necessary for the life I want to live?

This new way of thinking, complete with adventures in downsizing, has shaken me quite deeply. For most of my life, my “things” have been my life-line. My best friends. My safety net. I could never imagine my world without all the bits and trinkets and books and crap that I have acquired over some 27 years. But as I have moved several times in the past few years, and the last two times on my own (without a car), I’ve realized that I don’t want to be in charge of carrying so many heavy boxes of books and trinkets and baubles by myself as I move from place to place.

Flipping through the over 200 pages of images and descriptions of homes as small as 36 square feet and as large as 743 square feet, I realized the appeal of having less space, and therefore less stuff. Can you imagine fitting everything you own in a home you can carry with a pickup truck? Always having your bed with you?

It’s certainly not an adventure for everyone. If you are attached to the idea of more stuff equaling more power/more wealth, then having a tiny house won’t meet those needs. If you cannot part with your childhood toys, or live without your children’s art projects from grades one through twelve, it likely won’t be easy for you travel this way.

For me, this book (which I have carried with me everywhere since checking it out) is a persistent reminder of how much I crave space and simplicity. “Space” in the sense of expansiveness, of sacred belonging — not in extra room. You might remember my review of The Not So Big Life, in which I explore the concept of “not so big-ness” as a tool for creating expansion in my heart. What if I really could live in a place under 120 square feet, carrying only what I need, and exploring the continent?

What if everything we need could be created on a 7′ x 16′ trailer? What if our hearts could expand larger when our homes are smaller?

If the idea of parking your home on the edge of a forest, near a lake, on a mountain ridge, or in the desert — without ever packing up, or unpacking, or putting things in storage — then perhaps this is a book for you to explore. There are so many books and websites now for information about tiny houses, so this book isn’t your only resource. But if you want to get a good idea of a variety of tiny house layouts as well as some sample instructions for how to build your own tiny house, then check out The Small House Book!

Filed Under: book review, Read & Play Tagged With: , , 3 Comments
August 14, 2012

Get Started, Fail a Lot, and Then Try Something Else

photo by tableatny – click for info

This post first ran in March 2011.

You’re at a track meet. You’ve got a paper number pinned to your chest and you’ve got on some crazy colored spandex.

You pump your heels up and down. You stretch, side to side. You eye up the competition.

On cue, all the runners approach the starting line. You carefully place your snazzy Nikes into the starting blocks, you breathe deep, you gaze ahead. You wait.

Mere seconds feel like a lifetime.

Finally…

the gun shot! And you’re off! The race has started. You bolt down the track, legs pumping up and down, arms pushing you faster and faster.

Starting is not something you thought about it. It was a reflex. A reaction to the stimulus of the gun shot.

Some people have this natural reaction to the gun shot of a great idea.

A great idea can take a self-starter from sitting on her ass to creating all night long. A great idea can start a business in a day, create a piece of art in an hour, write a story in a month.

But somewhere along the line of Western education and corporate employment, most people were told that their natural reaction to starting needed to be suppressed. Jumping off the blocks at the sound of the gun was not allowed.

Instead endless meetings, countless hours of research, focus groups, and manager vetting had to come first. Then someone else would start.

You may have guessed by now that I’m not too excited about that model. There’s not much to get excited about.

I get excited about starting. About trying. About experimenting.

I get excited about allowing myself to try new things and fail at most of them.

And that’s why I’m excited about Seth Godin’s book, Poke the Box. In it, Godin explores all the fears and obstacles that we have been conditioned to feel about the idea of “starting something” – initiating.

What’s on your “allowed list?” What’s missing?

One idea that really struck a chord with me was the idea of an “allowed list.” He says:

Most employees can give you a long list of all the things they’re not allowed to do. Not-allowed lists exist in schools, in relationships, and in jobs…

It’s interesting that the allowed list is harder to remember and to write down. I think we might be afraid of how much freedom we actually have, and how much we’re expected to do with that freedom.

Right on, Mr. Godin.

One place that a “not allowed” list has no place in is your personal relationship with yourself and your great work.

Or, I suppose, you’re allowed one rule: You’re not allowed to do that which doesn’t work for you.

And because “allowed lists” are so difficult to remember and write down, I decided to create a short and simple one for you.



Download it. Print it. Tack it up. Share it.

This is your list. You are allowed to start, to fail, to do things your way, to stop preparing and start doing. You are allowed.

Now more than ever before.

Take advantage.

Filed Under: Buy You, For You Tagged With: , , 8 Comments