How do you juggle it all, stay focused and still make space for creative energy?

Most of us have diverse aspects of our daily lives which can lead to distraction and  fragmented thinking.  Whether it’s the need to juggle family, business and household or working on several related projects simultaneously, multi-tasking often breeds mediocrity.

Because I have a couple of different businesses, I am frequently bouncing between websites and blog posts and twitter accounts. Part of the challenge is the constant generation of ideas whirling in my brain faster than I can get them all down. So, I switch over to another page or file and record the thought. I get things accomplished but I know I could do better if I focused on one task at a time.

Every year I pick a word and for 2012, my word is FOCUS. I’ve not decided exactly how I will apply this to my work day but I have a few ideas. I may choose to work strictly on one business on certain days. If I am doing a project for Inspired Livelihood and something comes up for Craft Biz Blog, I’ll possibly just pretend that Craft Biz Coach is out of the office today and she will get back with you tomorrow. I’ll keep my Inspired Livelihood hat on all day. And then how do I handle areas of overlap in my businesses? Maybe I’ll divide my day spending morning on one biz and afternoon on the other.

As an artist, you may work on crafts that require diverse processes. Do you design Monday, fabricate Tuesday, solder Wednesday, market Thursday and pack and ship Friday? Do you throw pots in the morning, glaze others in the afternoon while others are firing? What happens when you get a burst of creative energy on a day that’s designated a marketing day? How do you organize your tasks so that you maintain sharp focus while continuing to be open to flow of inspiration?

My friend Barbara Winter has some great tips on 3 Ways to Sharpen your Focus HERE

What’s wrong with creating a job for yourself?

In the previous post, we talked about why bigger isn’t always better. Here I want to address a related issue that keeps cropping up in conversations with new and aspiring entrepreneurs.

There seems to be a lot of buzz these days about starting your business with your “escape” in mind and I think it scares many would-be entrepreneurs because they think they have to create this machine that can function without them.

For some people, this is a great idea, but to me, it gives the same message as Tim Ferris’s “4 Hour Workweek”-that work is not fun and is something to just get over with as quickly as possible so that we can get on with the business of life. Well, that seems counter-intuitive to the flavor of creating work you love. If the purpose of starting a business is to set yourself up to stop working, then, yes, it makes sense to create a business that can run itself without you. But what about those of us who don’t even consider retirement and want to share our special gift with the world or those who want to create income out of interests and enjoy our work?

Whether you’re employed at a job that’s a poor fit or you are out of work, you are likely considering some kind of a career change.  That can either mean looking for another job or starting or purchasing a business.  Unless you’re just putting in time until you can retire, you probably want to do something that has meaning to you and in this economic climate, finding that perfect job is even more difficult.

Not everyone who wants to start a business aspires to be a mega tycoon. Many people just want to escape a job that’s unsatisfying and find a livelihood that pays well and is enjoyable. If you fall into the second category, it’s best to tune out a lot of the chatter about starting a business not a job for yourself because your dream job would likely be one where you work where you want, with whom you want and do the kind of work you love. Well, if it’s your business, you get to choose where you work and who you work with and what kind of work you do because you have a great boss-YOU. You choose your benefits package and the type of retirement investing you want to do and you can design an exit plan that keeps paying you if you at some point decide to stop working.

Not only is there nothing wrong with creating a job for yourself, or in some cases “buying yourself a job”, it’s a damn good solution.

In future posts, we’ll address when buying yourself a job makes sense and how you can continue to earn should you ever decide to slow down.

Is bigger always better? Should you expand your business?

We’ve all heard the advise “Work on your business, not in your business. Leveraging is the key to growing your business. Get your business to the point where it can work without you.”  In some cases that is good advise but often it’s not.

Yes, leveraging can mean you have some passive income or that you can produce more revenue than you could on your own but bigger does not always mean more money, more free time or more satisfaction.

Some aspiring entrepreneurs have a goal of growing a large business and hanging out on a tropical island while employees run it, but chances are you are going to spend a lot of your time in an office planning, directing and delegating. Is that what you ultimately want your life to look like?

Let’s say you are a custom cabinet maker.  If you started your business because you love doing that kind of work with your hands and get satisfaction out of taking the project from design to completion, are you going to be happy doing the work to drum up clients, hiring other cabinet makers, ordering materials, keeping track of payables and receivables and handling payroll? Probably not.

In some circumstances keeping it small is a smart choice. Maybe you don’t want to deal with the administrative side of overseeing a large business. Perhaps you thrive on the actual service you perform or customer interaction. Sometimes growing large can be so costly with payroll taxes, worker’s compensation insurance, remote office rental, etc, that your net profit isn’t much greater than staying small and keeping your costs and quality of service under control.

Years ago after finishing massage school, I intended to open my own body-work center and hire other therapists to work for me for a percentage of the revenue. I’d had other businesses and knew the administrative load involved. To get practical experience in the spa industry, I subcontracted to a few resorts and what I discovered was that while I was comfortable with and good at the work involved in marketing and running a business, what I really loved was the hands on healing work with the client. I didn’t want to give that up in the interest of building a large business.

In the home furnishings business, however, I found I enjoyed the marketing and administrative side more than customer interaction so running a larger business made sense. However, there was a point at which rapid expansion proved less profitable because we grew faster than we could manage.

When I opened a contemporary craft gallery, I loved the face-to-face client contact and knew that I needed to out there with customers to learn their preference. I also needed to do the buying and attend trade shows to keep up on trends.   I didn’t want to be behind a desk doing paperwork so I delegated the book-keeping. Even though I loved working in the business, I also wanted and needed some free time for other activities I love like walking on the boardwalk, in the redwoods and traveling. Some small business owners will just close up shop a day or two to have time off but I wanted to be open seven days a week so I opted to hire additional exployees to work the gallery and have money coming in even if I was away. For me, that was the perfect mix of hands-on and delegating. When I was encouraged to expand and add other locations,  I knew that wouldn’t fit the lifestyle I was looking for at the time.

Before making the decision to expand your business, ask yourself what aspects of the business truly excite you and which tasks you prefer to avoid. If being out doing the actual service is most satisfying to you, it probably isn’t going to make you happy to have other employees or contractors doing the work and sitting back directing. You may be happier for the long run doing the work yourself and having an administrative person handling the appointment scheduling, phone calls and paperwork. Every entrepreneur has to find her own comfortable balance so don’t assume bigger is always best.

Is “Routine” synonymous with “Monotony” ?

An article in this morning’s Vibrant Nation reminded me of the # 1 reason I will probably always be self employed: I want every day to be new and fresh.  I hear this daily from clients wanting to leave the job world and start their own business. They want to escape the “same, old routine.”

The Vibrant Nation post is titled, “The secret to being your own boss?  Routine!”  However, when I read the article, author Kay Strom’s day is anything but tedious. Her “routine” includes scheduling time for soaking in the tub, a mid-day tea break, coffee dates with friends, daily river walks,  and speaking engagements on cruise ships. Hardly monotonous.

What Kay does that makes her writing life a success is schedule her days so that the things she wants to do have a time slot everyday along with the work she must do, including writing a chapter every single day.

Thinking back to times I’ve been most productive, I realize there was a lot of routine in my day. A couple of years ago, I spent several months in Florida  where I had an investment property. Daily beach walks, the primary constant in my day, had nothing and everything to do with productivity. Each Sunday evening, I checked the tide charts for the following week. Then I scheduled my work day, including appointments and phone calls around low tide. It was a different time each day, of course, but those beach walks were so important to me that I made sure I scheduled everything else I wanted to accomplish that day around them.  Not only were my walks good for my mental and physical well-being but often, my best ideas were born during those walks so I considered them a business necessity.

Like snowflakes, no two beach walks are ever exactly the same and none of my days was just like the one before. Some days I worked at home in my den. Other times, I checked out different coffee shops with internet access. Several times I brought my work to the clinic where I spent hours between medical appointments. Always, I scheduled my “routine” beach walk.

That same year, I spent months living and traveling in my volkswagon camper van. On the road, no two days are the same because the people and environment change, but I did have a kind of routine. Over breakfast, I’d check and answer emails, read a few favorite blogs, check weather and road conditions and decide on my route for the day. I’d usually drive for a few hours, then stop and make client calls, have group mastermind calls or record a telephone interview for my Inspired Livelihood inspired entrepreneur series. I’d have lunch, take a walk and drive a few more hours. At night, I’d write and schedule posts to appear on my blog.

Thinking back on that time, I realize it wasn’t a routine in the sense that I did the same things in the same place at the same time every day but my days did have structure and I believe it is that structure, the scheduled time for the things that matter, that’s the secret to successful self-employment. And structure does not have to be boring.

5 Tips for Keeping your Home-Based Business on Track

USA Today Small Business columnist Gladys Edmunds gave some great tips for keeping your home-based business on track. They may seem obvious but as someone who works from home, I know how easy it is to get distracted by household activity, get cabin fever and feel isolated or forget to delegate.

Her five main points were:

• Select a designated space in your home for your business.
• Make and keep a work schedule.
• Get out of the house daily.
• Don’t try to do everything yourself.
• Build a network of supportive entrepreneurs.

Read the whole article here: http://usat.ly/eJcRLu

Gladys Edmunds’ Entrepreneurial Tightrope column appears Wednesdays. As a single, teen-age mom, Gladys made money doing laundry, cooking dinners for taxi drivers and selling fire extinguishers and Bibles door-to-door. Today, Edmunds, founder of Edmunds Travel Consultants in Pittsburgh, is a private coach/consultant in business development and author of There’s No Business Like Your Own Business, published by Viking.

Find your Life Purpose or Calling in Your Life Theme?

Recently, I’ve been thinking a lot about life purpose and calling.  I have a birthday this month and for obvious reason, birthdays trigger the “ am I doing enough with my life”  syndrome.

An article by my friend Sandy Dempsey @sandydfromnj in The Dreaming Cafe Newsletter got me thinking even more about how a calling isn’t necessarily something we do for a living (although, I believe life’s even richer if it is) but an element that should be present in every aspect of our lives.

Because I help people create business that make a living and a difference, I naturally attract clients who talk a lot about finding their life purpose. Sadly, what I hear too frequently is that they are either afraid of not identifying their true calling or they don’t see how they can make a big enough impact to make a difference, so they do nothing.  My job, and I believe this is my calling but not my sole life purpose, is to show them the possibilities, that they aren’t limited to a single calling and that making a difference in their own community or even a change in one life may be what they are here to do. Not everyone, in fact almost no one, was truly born to change the world.

Life purpose isn’t about identifying your calling and doing one thing for the rest of your life.  I believe we can and do embrace our purpose in many different ways that evolve over a lifetime. Those of us with many interests have struggled with this at times because, particularly  for scanner types, we experience each new passion as “oh, I am really in my element.”

It’s only recently that I’ve recognized the different shapes that my purpose has taken over the years. Reviewing a mental inventory of my life portfolio, the common thread has been the call to teach and to help people to see their potential and recognize their options. I like to think of this as my life “theme”.   I know now that in many different roles as a sister, friend, mother, employer, both personally and in business, I have been embracing my calling to educate and inspire.

Until my early twenties, I manifested the call to teach in a more traditional sense. As a young child, I loved to help my little sister navigate the world and playing school  with my friends was one of my favorite after school activities. As a teen, I was a camp counselor, teaching arts and swimming. In college, I majored in Art Education with the dream of having my own creative arts school to inspire and encourage creativity. Then in my twenties, I got sidetracked by a challenge to create businesses. In each new business, I believed i had found my calling. In advertising and home furnishings, I had a knack for taking people who were uncomfortable with selling and teaching them how to sell authentically. When I had an art and contemporary craft gallery, I enjoyed and was good at teaching artists to market their work but I don’t see my life purpose as sales training. When I went to massage school and then started a body work business,  clients told me I was a gifted healer and I began to believe that was my calling. Then I fell and broke my hand so couldn’t do any bodywork for two months.  My colleagues began asking me for help building their healing arts practices so I developed my “Full Practice Formula” and wondered if my purpose was in fact teaching people to see the possibilities, value their art and market their skills.  It wasn’t until my fifties that I recognized how all these seemingly unrelated endeavors, from advertising, to retail, body work, home furnishings and art were just different forms of fulfilling my calling to educate and inspire.

When you identify a gift, that doesn’t mean it is your calling. Maybe it’s part of a much larger theme. For example, some young friends of mine call me “the baby whisperer” because I can pick up a baby whose been screaming for hours and instantly he’ll settle down. I don’t see my life purpose as calming colicky babies, but do see it’s part of my larger theme which is sharing things that come easily to me with others so that they see the possibility in themselves.

I believe most people are living their life purpose in one or many forms but may not recognize it or haven’t yet identified the joy and greater purpose in it.

If you feel like you are still searching for your calling, I suggest this exercise to help you identify your purpose or life “theme”.

Write down the different rolls you’ve played over the course of your life so far. Not just professionally but as a child, as a student, a friend and a parent.  Don’t simply list the skills you used or the tasks you performed. Really think about where the joy was in each of those circumstances. What were the “ahah” moments for you?  Where did you touch someone’s life? This could be when you helped your little brother learn to tie his shoes or the way you set the table for your parent’s bridge party.  Maybe you were the one who always knew how to convince the teachers, parents, other kids that something was a great idea. Even if you feel stuck in a boring job right now, you are probably doing something that is in some way manifesting your purpose. Are you always the one to bring order, humor or calm to a situation? Sometimes it’s not obvious but if you spend time really looking and listening, there are probably some similarities between the gifts you bring to your present life and the pieces of your past that brought you joy or made a difference for someone else.

What are the common threads in your history that may be a key to your life theme?

Is it ever too early to start talking to kids about making a living doing what they love?

My friend and mentor, Barbara Winter asked this question on Facebook, “How do you keep your curiosity alive?” My initial response was that curiosity is an innate trait rather than a skill that needs to be honed. However, Barbara replied that all two year olds are curious-we all are born with curiosity  but it is often discouraged. That makes sense to me. While in my family of origin, curiosity was valued and encouraged, I married into a more reserved family and my husband was embarrassed when I would ask too many questions, calling it “nosey”.

This conversation on FB reminded me of all the valuable human traits we are born with but taught to suppress in favor of politeness, safety or fitting the mold.

About a year ago, I read an article in a Canadian newspaper about a study done in Ottowa schools. As I recall, the conclusion was that career counseling should start as early as 6th grade. That may seem very young for a student to begin planning for a career but think about one of the first questions nearly every re-careering coach asks you. What kinds of things fascinated you when you were a child? What could you spend hours doing?

Since our earliest interests are key to our ideal livelihood, it sure seems reasonable that we’d begin exploring viable career options with kids in elementary school. The occupation a child aspires to at that age is based on passion, not paycheck and external expectations. So, exploring different careers at such an early age may just keep young people more focused on making a living doing something they love rather than what their parents, teachers or society deem an appropriate career for them.

Many schools do have a career day of some sort that involves parents coming to school and discussing what they do and students have the opportunity to shadow an adult at work for a day. When my son was in grade school, there were two commercial pilots and a pitcher for the Padres among the parents. When I suggested that either my husband or I go to talk about being entrepreneurs, our son said, “no one wants to grow up to be a business man.” I agree that if we went to school and talked about sales quotas, projections and balance sheets we’d have put the kids to sleep (and embarrassed our son). But talking about getting paid to do what you love and the benefits of self employment (like taking your dog to work or  taking your work and your kids on a  snorkeling vacation) would have peeked their interest in entrepreneurship.

In primary school, all the boys wanted to be firemen or policemen because they were heros. Why not show them examples of businesses that make a difference and improve lives; entrepreneurs who teach a whole village to make a living and bring schools,  clean drinking water and shoes to children their age? Almost daily I hear from middle aged adults who’ve spent decades in a career they were bored with, chosen because they were told they had an aptitude for it or because it was expected of them. They are looking for something that has more meaning, that they enjoy. What would happen if we didn’t have to go back and reconnect with the passions of our youth because we were encouraged in grade school to start thinking about doing something we love for a living instead?

Do you remember what you loved to do as a child? Were you encouraged to think about doing that for a living? What kinds of messages did parents, teachers and advisors give you about career choices? Were they based on your passions or your aptitude and societies expectations? As always, you are invited to share your thoughts with our readers below.

Permission to Unplug

Do you ever feel like you are just so overwhelmed with emails, newsletters and google alerts that you don’t know what to respond to first? Or that if you don’t keep up with everything  related to your business you will miss something vitally important?  Between invitations to join free tele-seminars, podcasts and  webinars, you can easily spend the entire day without even connecting on the social networks or checking the blog posts in your RSS feed reader.

In the fall of last year, I was feeling absolutely overwhelmed with electronic information.  My head was spinning with all the input and I had no time or energy left for “output” such as product creation or my own writing.  I wasn’t sleeping well because I couldn’t stop the flow of ideas and felt that I never had time to execute all of them.

What I previously saw as a gift, my ability to continuously generate new ideas, felt more like a curse. Nonstop internal chatter was beginning to interfere with my ability to give my private clients the focused attention they deserved. Because my commitment to clients is my priority,  I wasn’t following through on several projects I’d started. While I solved that by sharing some of those business ideas with colleagues and clients who could implement them, I was feeling anxiety about not developing new programs for 2011.

My son was coming for a week at Thanksgiving and I didn’t want to be frazzled and grouchy so I made a BIG, DRASTIC DECISION. I gave myself permission to UNPLUG. Not just for a few days but for as long as it took to refresh and refocus. I did scroll through emails once daily just to make sure there was nothing urgent from family or friends, but left hundreds of emails unopened, didn’t check in on Facebook or Twitter or read blogs. And my world didn’t fall apart. Rather, things started coming together again.

Yes, this is contradictory to the advise you receive from business coaches and mentors. I too recommend reaching out to your readers and followers regularly through blog posts, newsletters and social networking. You do need to stay current on what’s happening in your industry, but at what point are you trying to process so much information that you put off making decisions for fear of making the wrong decision?

There’s lots of information online about how to manage your time, apps for handling that information and an overwhelming number of articles about how to get out of overwhelm. Even with good time management, there is just so much information out there that if you try to read everything for fear of missing something, you may just end up doing nothing. Maybe it’s time you give yourself permission to unplug and get centered. You’ll likely come back refreshed, recharged and ready to focus.

As always, your comments are welcome below.  I’d love to hear how you handle information overload.

A Joyfully Jobless State of Mind

Today’s  guest post is by Ken G Roberts, one of my favorite writers/bloggerss who lives a life of quiet inspiration and writes at http://www.mildlycreative.com

Tonight, when I come home from the cafe, I’ll put my tips in a jar and come back to this place, the place where I keep my pencils and papers and pens, the place where I do my real work.

For now, waiting tables is how I make my money, but writing and drawing is how I get paid. I didn’t always know that was possible, that your real work could pay you in other ways, that there were other forms of currency in this world.

Money, being so vital, often overshadows things like satisfaction, pride (the good kind), and a sense of doing something meaningful, but those are important means of compensation.

I guess I’m thinking about all of this because in two weeks I’ll be joining some of my friends at the the Joyfully Jobless Jamboree in Austin, Texas, and, for a while, I wasn’t sure I really belonged there. I’m not always joyful and, as noted, I technically have a job.

But I’m far more joyful than I’ve ever been, and, for the past two years, I’ve felt kind of jobless.

Yes, I have this place I go to and this thing I do to make money, but it’s not the same as a job to me. I’ve been employed in ways that made J-O-B a four-letter word.

Those jobs were things I thought I had to have, things I couldn’t do without, things that I didn’t want to screw up and lose even though I hated them. It was all about keeping the bosses happy.

But waiting tables is not a job for me. It’s work, but it’s not a job. I don’t hate it. If I did, I’d find something else to do, but instead it provides the money I need to survive and supports the work I need to do to thrive.

As far as bosses go? Well, I’m the one I try to keep happy these days, and no one’s been complaining so far.

I hope this work will someday make me money too, but I’ll do it even if it doesn’t. That’s how I know it’s my real work.

I guess that’s why I’m feeling so joyful today. Joyfully jobless.

Seems as though the Joyfully Jobless Jamboree is precisely where I need to be in a couple of weeks. Austin, Texas here I come.

Maybe you’d like to join me. There’s still room they tell me.

What does “happily-ever-after” look like to you?

A young couple I know are planning a June wedding. There’s talk about the dresses, flowers and reception but nothing about what their lives will look like after the honeymoon.
We all know people who enjoyed the perfect fairy tale wedding. Are they all still living happily ever after years later?  Some are, but many are struggling with disappointments because their lives together don’t match their expectations. They may have been so focused on the fairy tale wedding that they forgot to plan the happily-ever-after.
No long term relationship survives without the ability to adjust to unexpected challenges. People grow and change and their relationship changes too.
Business, like marriage, has to remain flexible. The business you start now is not likely to resemble the business you have in a few years. Still, like marriage, if you don’t have a clear vision of how you want that business success to look and feel, your odds not good.
Two entrepreneurs I admire published articles this weekend that talk about envisioning what it means to succeed.
Rasheed Hooda’s question, “What does happily ever after look like?” is an important one to ask yourself at the start of any new endeavor. Read his post at Present Day Nomad.

In her weekly newsletter yesterday, Sandy Dempsey posed the question: “What does success look like?”. If you aren’t already a subscriber to Sandy’s newsletter, I invite you to join me Sunday mornings at The Dreaming Cafe..

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