You might think: Couldn’t a bookkeeper do that better? Why don’t I have an accountant manage my money?

Isn’t my time better spent doing something that only I can do?

Sometimes, but not always.

There is this idea that you should outsource everything that you can and make the maximum use of your time doing only creative special things that only you can do to move your business forward.

And that’s true to a certain extent. It certainly wouldn’t make sense for me to try to learn how to build my computer myself, or for me to do my taxes manually. There are some really easy and simple ways to outsource or buy ready made solutions.

But really hiring someone to do something takes a lot of time and investment. You’ve got to train them and manage them. It’s not such a simple decision.

If my only goal was to grow a giant company, that would probably be good advice to outsource nearly everything I could. If you are on the growth path, it makes sense to have other people do anything you are inefficient at doing, and stick to your core strengths.

But my goal is not to grow a big company. My goal is to enjoy my life.

And I enjoy doing my own accounting. I enjoy having manual and menial tasks to do sometimes. Sure, I could hire a VA, etc. Sure the attitude of “I can do it myself” gets in the way of growth. But I don’t care.

There is no way in hell I’m handing my money over to someone else to manage. I like doing it myself. I’m always happy when Friday rolls around and it pops up on my to-do list. And I am very picky and want to know where my money is at all the time anyway. So it works for me.

Never forget the point of your business.

I didn’t start my business to be in business. I started my business to support myself to be lazy and do what I considered fun all day.

Along the way, I’ve had goals to serve my customers and clients in various ways I consider cool. But my goal has never been to “grow, grow, grow”.

That’s a backwards goal to me. What is the point of growth? If you have an answer to that, for you, then go for it. But I have never found a compelling reason for me why having a big company is better than having a small company.

Note: I don’t mean “big” as in “famous”, I mean “big” as in “employees, payroll, a bookkeeper”.

Keep your own goal in mind and make decisions accordingly.

Here are things that definitely are better to outsource:

• things you hate doing, especially to the point where you avoid them completely and they never get done
• things that are so complex you don’t understand them (for instance, if I ever decided to have real employees and do payroll, I would definitely outsource that)
• things that you don’t have the ability to do and aren’t interested in learning

Then there are a whole lot of activities that you may or may not want to outsource depending on how annoying and time-consuming they are on a daily basis:

• things that you could learn to do but don’t matter that much to you and someone else could do just as well
• things that you are only kinda good at doing and someone else could do better and you don’t have much interest in anyway

But here are things I actually do not outsource:

• things that other people could do better…but I actually like doing in my slow, semi-lame way where I get to learn as I go and have fun doing it
• things that don’t require much brain power and others could do without trouble, and not doing them would free me up to do more creative things…but that I actually like doing and provide a welcome relief from more brain-sucking tasks

Programming is good example of something I could but don’t outsource - I’m not a programming whiz, it takes me a long time to do, but I’m super-picky and I like the challenge. Could someone else do it better? Definitely. Could my business grow faster if I outsourced it? Without a doubt. Am I likely to outsource it anytime soon? I doubt it.

I’ve poked and prodded under the hood, tried out a half dozen different programmers, and diagnosed myself with trust issues, but the truth is I just don’t want to outsource it.

I want to figure it out myself. I like figuring things out myself. Part of what I love about business is that I get to figure things out myself.

The other part of it is, while I could outsource it, it would be expensive. And I’d have to do things I don’t enjoy - managing people, growing enough to pay for the programmer - in order for the privilege of letting someone else do the thing that I actually kinda like doing myself. Doesn’t seem like a good trade-off to me.

Am I wasting my time?

Possibly. I’m never going to become a whiz programmer. It’s not one of my core strengths.  And I don’t love it, I just like it.

But it’s my time to waste.

I’m not in business to be in business. I’m in business to be able to spend my time doing what I like to do.

Even if it seems inefficient and silly for me to do my own bookkeeping and my own programming, I’m much happier if I do it. And my happiness matters more to me than some ideal of outsourcing perfection.

There’s this ongoing storyline in Star Trek where Captain Kirk always ends up screwing things up so he doesn’t get a promotion to being an Admiral. But the thing is, he doesn’t want to be an Admiral. He wants to be the captain of his own ship. He wants to be out where the action is. So he’s not really self-sabotaging is he? He knows what he likes and wants to keep doing it.

Just because something is a good idea doesn’t mean it’s a good idea for you.

There are always standards and expectations that develop in anything, and business has plenty of them. There are always people saying what you should and shouldn’t do and what’s a good and bad way to run your business.

Don’t listen to them.

I mean, listen if they are saying something helpful to you, but always check in with yourself around if you really want to do what they are suggesting and if it makes sense for you.

If you are like me, you got into business to do things your way. You still get to do that.

If doing things your way is hurting your business, then look at that. But if it is just slowing it down, and you don’t really care to be a megacorp anyway, then you might consider just relaxing and enjoying yourself.

Tips for business DIY

It’s good to recognize when you need help learning how to do what you want to do yourself. I spend a lot of time researching various strategies on the Internet, but I also have a programming buddy to talk things over with. I talk to my business buddies about their accounting strategies and research things like S-corps vs LLCs.

Instead of hiring a bookkeeper, consider hiring an accountant for a few hours of consulting to go over your system and help you streamline it. Find mentors and tutors and advisers that can help you steer around the major pitfalls. Hire “consulting help” instead of “replacing-yourself help”.

Last but not least, affirm your choice:

• it’s OK for me to do my own ___ if I feel like it
• it’s OK for my company to grow as fast or as slow as I choose
• it’s OK for me to be picky about how this is done
• it’s OK for me to do it myself until I can afford someone who is as good at it as I am
• it’s OK for me to do it myself even if I can afford someone who is as good at it as I am
• my life and my happiness is more important than an ideal of business success
• I’d rather be happy than huge

Make your own affirmations if these don’t fit - it’s about affirming what is right for you, rather than going along with an established idea of what is right.

And you know what? That’s OK.

Winter is supposed to be slow.

Taoism is a lot about following the natural rhythm of things. And the natural rhythm of winter is to hibernate. Many species do it in various forms. Bears and many other animals either hibernate of go into other kinds of reduced metabolic activity. Plants have different growth cycles and usually slow down or stop during the winter.

Our culture has this always-on mentality.

You should blog consistently. You’ve got to do marketing constantly, keep your numbers up. Keep in touch with your customers. Keep up on the industry. Stay informed, be on top of your game.

Blah. That’s not what winter is about.

That’s fine for spring or summer. But in the fall or winter, the natural order of things doesn’t support that kind of go-go-go energy.

It’s normal to get sluggish. Let yourself have it.

Fall and winter are Yin months. They are about slowing down, reviewing the growth of the past year, grieving and letting go (Samhain, Day of the Dead, Yom Kippur), pondering and considering, letting all the new growth settle in and integrate into your system.

When we push ourselves to go against our bodies inclinations, we court depression.

I wonder how much of seasonal depression is actually our internal resistance to just letting ourselves be slower during the winter.

Slow is not necessarily depressed. But I notice that if my inner-critic is going to town about how slow I am being, then I will get depressed. If I feel like napping and going for a walk instead of working, and make myself work, or jackal myself about how I ought to be working, that is really not going to contribute to a happy state of mind.

Our culture doesn’t get slowness. It’s seriously over-Yangified. That means you’ve got to take matters into your own hands.

Affirm winter, embrace winter.

I’m giving myself full permission to move with the rhythm of winter. To go slow, “produce” less, spend more time with feelings of sadness, take my time, adjust to the true pace of the season. (i.e. not the crazy frenetic pace of the “Christmas season”, which is so NOT a season. The season is winter, and the pace is slooooow.

Winter is about reconnecting to something deep and eternal. That takes time.

Death and grieving remind us of the shortness and preciousness of life. Slowing down, we drop what is unimportant or inconsequential. We remember what really matters and reconnect to it. This takes time, presence, quiet. This is the gift of winter. Let yourself have it.

The questions hungry bloggers want to know: How do I make money from my blog, should I put ads on it, how much traffic to I need to make money?

The short answer is: you are asking the wrong questions.

First, pageviews aren’t the most relevant issue to selling ads.

If you are considering ads, the issue is does your topic lend itself to ads? Would a business want to advertise on your blog? Do your readers click on ads?

I have two sites that get decent traffic (not blogs). One gets 250K pageviews a month and I make about $1400/month on it (it’s about half-monetized to its potential right now I think).

My second site gets twice the pageviews. And I’ve never made more than a few dollars a month in clicks on it. Why? Different audience, different mindset.

The first site is a hobby site, it’s about how to make jewelry. The ads are for jewelry supplies and jewelry. Both of which my readers are interested in. And, when they are in “hobbyist” mode, they are also in “shopping” mode.

The second site is a free wallpaper site. It’s nice, high quality photos, but still…it’s free stuff. Hardly any relevant ads are available (when I tried that I had to keep screening out the ads for actual wallpaper). And nobody is in a shopping mood. They want their free wallpaper and that’s it. They aren’t browsing around looking for opportunities to spend money. They are looking for something pretty, they find it, and they close their browser.

And that’s fine. I have that site because I like purty pictures. I don’t expect it to make money (although I do explore various ideas now and then because money is always nice, and if I come up with a way to monetize it, I’ll let you know).

Your ability to sell ads on a blog depends more on what your content is and what kind of traffic that brings - not how much.

If your blog is about digital camera reviews - well gee, you’ve got a lot of ad options. If your blog is about postmodern gender dynamics, good luck. Maybe you can sell ads for textbooks for grad students. =)

A blog can be highly trafficked but fundamentally not ad-worthy from the perspective of ad buyers. And that’s your customer, if you are trying to sell ads.

Personally, I have 3 blogs, but I don’t plan to make money directly from them at all. I have a separate business, that pays my bills, and I blog for fun. I plan to write ebooks maybe at some point, try that out, I there is potential there if you market it well and it’s info people think they need. But monetize my blogs themselves? I think it would be pointless.

Second, ads may not be what you want to sell.

Most blogs, mine included, are better suited for being a vehicle to build awareness of your personal brand - which you can then use as a platform to sell products or services that you’ve developed. Not ads.

Ads will only work for a small percentage of blogs that are about real-world topics that are well researched and thoughtfully presented to be useful. Hobbies, product testing - those will work for ads. Anything that’s personal opinion and commentary is not going to be very lucrative unless you are well known enough that your opinion is taken as an endorsement. And it takes a lot of work to build up that kind of reputation.

Most of the time, ads dilute the personal brand that a blog is such a great vehicle for building.

If you are going to spend the kind of time/effort it takes to build that reputation, I think it makes more sense to develop your own information products as your primary business model. These kinds of products are an extension of your personal brand - it makes sense, they go together. Endorsements and partner deals (recommending each others info products) can be a supplement.

There is a lot more profit in this than selling ads. Ads are essentially selling other people’s products, which means you get just a small percentage of the revenue from the sale. It makes more sense to me to make your own products and sell those. You can make a heck of a lot more profit for less work, if you learn how to write good sales copy.

The bottom line: if you are asking the question “How can I make money from my blog?”, you need to back up.

The question to ask yourself is: “What business am I in - what is my business model?”. When you answer that, you can then ask “How could my blog help build that business?”.

In short, making money is about thinking in terms of business, and blogging is no different.

The good news is, business is a jolly fun game to learn and not so hard once you get the hang of it. =)

And then yesterday I realized, I’m completely exhausted.

Here’s what GTD is missing: sometimes you need to re-evaluate your commitments. Not just come up with the next thing and do it. Sometimes you’ve got to ask yourself “What am I doing? Do I even want to do this?”

So. I made a chart. Listing all my current commitments - not just “projects”, but any ongoing thing. Especially the ongoing things, that don’t even make it to the “project” list, because they are in the background.

I included everything major - personal, business, family. Also commitments that I am considering adding, or will be coming up soon. I put in all regular practices and groups, so I can see how they are working for me now. And anything that I can sense is stressing me out in some way, even if it doesn’t meet the traditional meaning of “a commitment”.

It looks something like this:

The right-hand column is completely stream-of-consciousness.

Don’t decide what to do about anything, just write.

The idea is to uncover any hidden stuff - unconscious agreements that you have taken on without realizing it, feelings that you were kinda ignoring but they’ve been taking your energy.

Don’t think too much, just write what comes up for you when you think about the thing, as honestly as possible. Spew out all your snarky thoughts, grumpy resentments, or bubbly excitements. This is just to see what is there.

Even if you think you know what you will say, just write. You are interested in what you will write after what you “know” is on the page. When you get the surface thoughts down, then the next thought underneath it will come out. And the next one. And those are the thoughts that matter. An attitude of discovery helps: “I wonder what will come up writing about this?”.

Then what?

When can see everything in black and white, it’s a lot easier to see when you have gaping problems. Like that you are spending 10 hours a week doing something that you hate. Or that is getting your business nowhere. Or that some personal stuff is taking up a lot of your energy right now and you can give yourself a break about getting less done right now.

Look at the list as a whole, kinda from a third-person perspective, almost like it’s someone else. See what you notice. Are you making some bizarre compromises? What do you see that is obviously not working for you and could be tossed?

Remember, don’t do anything about it yet! Just notice.

If you don’t know where you are, it’s hard to find the route to get where you want to be.

Making the list is like taking a snapshot to really see what is going on in your life and your emotional body, below the surface of daily tasks. Then you know where you are starting from, which is important for any kind of change.

Then I advise taking a break and letting all that you noticed percolate around in your mind.

Let your unconscious get ahold of it - it’s good at doing the “heavy lifting” of making decisions.

Don’t make yourself toss things right away, or feel like you “should” be trimming down those things that are sucking your time. All you have to do is become aware of it. That lets your mind know that you care about - then, in the back of your mind, it will start going to work solving the problem of how to shift things around. Trust me, it works!  I try to never have my conscious mind do work that my unconscious can do better. (It’s kind of like learning to lift with your legs instead of your back).

The fact is that “what is important to you” isn’t something you can just analyze with your head. You want your heart and your body to weigh in too. If you’re like me, your heart and your body might need some time to think about it - ponder, percolate, sleep on it, etc - and get back to you.

So the point here isn’t to make a list and then do something about it. The point is to make the list and notice what is on the list. If you really notice things and become aware of them, the doing will often take care of itself.

And I’m not afraid anymore.

Here’s what I learned: I was really afraid of myself.

I was afraid I would get latched onto the idea of being “biggified” and start doing inauthentic things to try to be liked, to make up for my childhood. Which sucked.

As a kid, I never felt like I belonged; other kids never seemed to want to get to know me. I was the dorky smart weird girl wearing boys clothes two sizes too big (hand-me-downs). I was the kid of atheist hippies in a small mostly-Christian logger town.

It was just not a good fit.

Since biggification boils down mostly to “more well known”, I was afraid that my desperate unneed to belong would come surging up and make me do really dumb things.

Like try to be some kind of perfect working-automaton who gets everything on her to-do list done, is nice to everyone, has no authentic messiness and is clean and shiny all the time, goes to bed at a “respectable” hour like 10 and wakes up early to do yoga or <shudder> go jogging.

But I didn’t realize all this a few weeks ago. I just wanted to get through this stuff. I didn’t even know what the fear was. I was just like “OK, I’m going to try this on”.

It turns out I was being run by an internal belief that goes like this:

Nobody will like me for my real self, so to biggify I would have to be somebody else.

And my mind, being a logical creature (it its own way), when I really pushed it to get OK with biggifying, what did it do? It started trying really hard to be that “somebody else”! (My mind is sweet in its obedience but not very bright.)

And my resistance, the staying up late and getting no sleep “self-sabotage” was my body’s way of putting on the breaks and screaming I don’t wanna be not-myself!

Thank God for resistance.

The last few weeks my “getting things done” craze of ambition to catapult myself through my fears of biggification has been matched step by step with my digging-in-its-heels resistance, and the net result was an entirely exhausted Emma.

But I finally got it. It was me all along.

I’m not afraid of being “biggified”. I’m afraid of who I will turn myself into to get there - and even worse, who I would get stuck trying to be if I got a taste of being successful at it.

See, if I believe that I have to be someone else to be liked, then the more I am liked, the more that “somebody else” I have to be — the more careful, the more complete the subterfuge I have to keep up with. And if I have this desperate unmet need that hasn’t been healed running me, I could turn into a total I-want-people-to-like-me addict.

And my body wanted nothing to do with that kind of stress. So it rebelled.

And I’m really glad it did.

If not for my body saying “NO!”, I wouldn’t have asked myself: What is wrong with this picture? Why am I trying so hard? What happened to my whole “intrinsic motivation” and “plenty of time to nap” thing? Why do I suddenly have 20 things on my to-do list that I feel this panicky need to complete? Why am I running myself ragged to get this project done? What is running me?

So after a few weeks of pushing myself hard, a week of feeling super tired and unfocused, and two days of trying to remember who I was anyway and taking some time off from the frackin’ to-do list, I finally got it. (Well, and about a half dozen of those miraculously helpful serindipitously healing situations that come up to point you on your way when you really commit to working through something.)

So. Now that I see the belief, I can do something about it. Phew.

So here’s the healing part.

First, I feel really solid now that no matter who likes me or doesn’t like me, nothing matters more to me in this life than being myself. I could never relax or be happy being anybody else. So that option - I’m throwing it out the window. Fame, money - any of that stuff pales in comparison to the joy of walking around in the world being happy in my skin.

I’m really happy to come back to this realization, because I’ve lived with this fear for a long time: if I had the chance to be really liked as somebody who was not quite me, would I take it? Would I sell myself out to belong? It’s such a relief to know that — no. I don’t want to be bigger if that is the price. I don’t care that much about it.

I don’t think that is the price, but I’m happy to know that I don’t have to be afraid of that desperate, insecure part of me anymore. I can welcome her back into myself (my definition of healing). As long as I was afraid of her, there was a split between me and her, that little girl who wanted so much to be included and didn’t know how to make that happen.

Now I get to tell her that I love her exactly as she is. That she doesn’t need to change to be loved. She is OK and want her in my life. And that’s really what she’s needed to hear all along.

And then I get to grieve. Looking back I can see that there just wasn’t any way the inclusion I wanted was going to happen. Who I was, how I was raised, in that town, in that school - the chances of having an easy time making friends were sketchy to nil. It’s sad, and…it’s not my fault. I couldn’t have earned any more love than I got back then…and all my striving to figure it out didn’t change the fact that it hurt to be so lonely day after day, and that is just true.

And accepting that, I can also see that in the present day, I don’t want to spend my life-energy trying to figure out how to get the Internet to love me, or how to be someone who more people will like. I don’t need to try to be liked anymore. That stuff happened back then; now, I have found people I fit with. I don’t really need the whole world to love me as long as my friends do.

I just want to be me, and do what I love, to write and share and connect and discuss and figure out ways to offer people what they need that I have to give. And what comes of it comes of it. And I know good will come of it because I am good and life is good and my world no longer consists of an elementary school playground.

So does that mean I don’t want to “biggify”? Hell no! It’s fun. =)

Now I get to work on what biggification actually is.

Which is something like this: stepping into and owning your own power. Becoming OK with it. Letting go of what doesn’t serve you anymore. Owning your own legitimacy. Being OK when some people don’t like you because you are reaching the people you care about. Finding a focal point to catalyze your intention into productive action (i.e. choose somewhere to start and get on with it). Learn what you need to learn, do what you need to do, play hard, have fun, and never forget that it’s all just a game.

Note: The word “biggification”, which I’ve been bantying around lately, was invented by the illustrious Havi. I like it, for it’s non-icky connotations. Mad props to her for inventing a word that is so awesomely more friendly than “marketing” or “promotion”. Go read her awesome blog about biggification, destuckification, and how to work through unhelpful patterns in non-icky ways.

How to make blogging suck:

• Think you need to sound like you know “what you are talking about” and then don’t write because you can’t think of anything really profound to say.
• Hide out in your posts. Don’t write what is really going on for you or what you are struggling with, because someone might figure out that you don’t know “what you are talking about”.
• When you think you know “what you are talking about”, write advice-sounding stuff, and then feel bad later because you can’t even follow it yourself.
• Write really dry and philosophical posts because you’ve taken all the juicy gory bits about your own life out because they might make you sound bad.
• Feel weird about blogging and don’t really commit to it because you don’t really want to be any more of a freak than you already feel like you are.
• Worry about the things you need to re-do on your blog and tell yourself you’ll write after you fix them, because you don’t want anybody to see your blog in it’s not-quite-perfect state. Then don’t fix them either.
• Feel very annoyed and righteous when commenters don’t “get it” and miss the whole point of your post while praising it as if they got it.
• Ignore other bloggers because you are afraid they might like you and then you’d feel obligated to read their blog every day and you’d also feel obligated to write every day or at least every other day or maybe at the VERY least more than once a week. 
• Blog more often than you really feel inspired to because you think you “should”, and then realize that those posts suck because they were manufactured, not inspired.
• Decide that means you are actually a bad writer.
• Compare yourself to other bloggers who have lots of comments.
• Feel like you are writing into a void and what is the point.
• Develop a whole love/hate relationship with blogging, ignore all your blogs for months, all the while feeling guilty about your lack of posting.
• Decide that maybe you have nothing important to say anyway.

How to make blogging awesome:

• Read other people’s blogs who you really enjoy (when you feel inspired to) and comment. Write posts in response to their posts. Find a little community of bloggers who also Twitter and follow each other and write and comment and tweet happily along. Bonus: find local folks you can actually meet in person and breathe the same air with.
• If you don’t get to your RSS reader in say, a week or two, feel happy that you have Twitter so that you’ll get reminded ever so often when the people you care about blog because they’ll Twitter about it.
• Tweet your posts so people who know you will see them and read them.
• Seriously, Twitter rocks as a complement to blogging.
• Give yourself a break about the massive information overload and realize nobody keeps up with all the Twittering and blogging and etc that you could possibly keep up with so dip into it the stream when you want to and unplug and go for a walk when you don’t. The stream will still be there and you’re only going to feel like swimming so much of the time.
• Be grateful to commenters, even when they completely missed the point of your post, because that sometimes happens and it’s OK, someone somewhere will someday get it and even if they didn’t get “it”, they got something and that’s good too.
• If you can’t find time to write, write down your ideas for posts anyway, because even if you never do develop them into posts, getting them out of your head keeps the stream of ideas coming through you, so when you do have time/energy, something will come through for you to write about.
• Accept that there will always be things you want to fix about your blog.
• Write about things that you did or are doing that actually worked, not things you think you should do or sound good but you haven’t actually done because they could be one of those things that sounds good but doesn’t actually work and therefore helps nobody, not even you and you’re the one who wrote it.
• Put out to the Universe that you want to receive affirmation of what you are doing and that it matters.
• Show up with all your dirty laundry AND your philosophy, humorously and with drawings. Work the lessons in with the stories.
• Write because you love people, not because you want people to love you.
• Get awesome comments from people who really do get it.
• Feel completely awesome about the whole blogging thing.
• Decide you are completely legitimate and have awesome things to say that totally matter and people do get and appreciate.
• Be super happy that the Universe is good, art lives, things matter, love happens, and you get to be part of this glorious expanding everything God-Universe thing we call life.

There are two fears I am still working through around showing up bigger in the world.

Fear #1: People will only like me for my coolness, not for me.

This is a weird fear. It goes like this:

As a kid, I found it very hard to belong. I was too weird, too smart, too good at school, too actually-interested in the homework, too nerdy, too weirdly dressed, too poor, and too not-Christian.

So I developed various coping strategies to try to “be liked”.

The biggest one was to be impressive. To know things others didn’t know, to be wise, to have profound insights that wow people, to be able to do things others couldn’t do, to be so weird that people noticed and talked about me. To be notorious. To be different. I love it when I’m the only one who can open a jar that’s stuck (no, I don’t work out, I just grew up on a farm). I tell freaky stories about my childhood, about my mom’s crack-head boyfriends, my dad and brothers butchering a deer on the dining room table (Did I mention I grew up on a farm? Did you get that I had a really bizarre, unique, and weird childhood? Did you get that part?)

Yeah…pretty much anything for people to say “Wow!” and be all fascinated by me.

But as soon as I get the payoff, I feel resentful. Because I really want to be liked for who I am.

I want to be loved for who I am, not for what happened to me, or what I can do. I don’t want to have to perform to be liked. I don’t want people to think I’m different than they are, I want to feel included and like I belong.

So it’s a very self-defeating strategy. As these things usually are. So I’m trying to learn to show up around other people just as me, without doing that whole song and dance.

How it gets in the way of me showing up “bigger”:

I don’t want the things that really matter to me, like spirituality and healing, to become part of an inauthentic strategy to get people to like me.

So, I still have this pattern but I’m slowly unlearning it. It’s a fine line to walk, to show up bigger, because I’m afraid this old strategy will co-opt what I’m doing and use it. That I’ll somehow become addicted to being noticed, to getting more subscribers, more comments, etc.

Fear #2: I will become a boring mindless automaton who only cares about being “productive”.

I stumbled upon this fear while trying to understand this part of me that just will not go to bed at a reasonable hour. The conversation went something like this:

Emma: Hmm, so I’m noticing that I feel happier and get more done if I wake up around 9, instead of noon. What do you think about going to bed around 11 or midnight instead of 2 or 3am?

Stucknessything: What, so you can be more “productive”? So you can “get things done?” What kind of B.S. is that? Is that why we did all this personal growth work, to turn into a mindless worker-bee automaton tool? You think you will finally be legitimate if you do that? That you’ll get the pat on the head from society that you’ve always wanted? Well f**k that! I’m watching House and then I’m going to play Runescape and eat ice cream and I’ll go to bed when I damned-well feel like it! Your conformity BS can go f**k itself!

I tried empathizing and talking with it, but I didn’t get that far with it yet. It’s super terrified that I’ll lose my authenticity, become addicted to social rewards of legitimacy, and lose touch with my true self completely. It thinks of itself as my “last stand”.

Why am I sharing these? It’s not like I’ve figured them out.

True.

I’m sharing them because my point on my last post is that you don’t have to know how you are going to get through something to start looking at it.

Sometimes you finally look at something, and it just falls away. It dissolves before your eyes.

Sometimes, it takes a lot of looking, a lot of conversations, a lot of self-love and insight before something is really worked through. That’s OK. Just start by saying hello to it.

The other thing I want to point out is that I’m damn glad these fears are their entrenched stuckness are there. They are looking out for me. Yeah, I’ve got to find a way to do what they are doing in ways that don’t have such a high cost. I want to heal the stuff that has them so afraid: the wounds that keep me feeling like I don’t belong and who I am and what I do is not legitimate.

They are protecting some things that are vital and important to me: my authenticity, my connection to my true self, and my longing to be seen and loved and valued for who I am.

But if they weren’t there, dogging for that healing, making it impossible to ignore them, I wouldn’t be protected at all.  They are the lions at the gate, and I want them to be there as long as I need them to be.

An essential part of true healing is valuing and loving the strategies that are trying to meet your needs in the best way they know how.

Just like feelings, your “stucknesses” and patterns are messages about what is deeply important to you.

Don’t ignore them, force your way past them, or make them wrong.

First, if you ignore them, they’ll just silently make your life miserable. You’ll end up depressed because you’ll be using a ton of energy to combat them.

Second, you won’t get the true healing and liberation and freed up energy that comes from understanding and working out actually helpful ways to meet the needs they are advocating for.

So go for the gold. Keep looking at the thing, with love, until it’s no longer a thing.

The only caveat to this: When you really have done the healing work, sometimes you just have the habit energy left. In that case, when it comes up, it’s OK to shift your attention away from “the thing”, and do whatever it is you were aiming for. And if you give it a few minutes to acknowledge it and its fears and really important mission, it will understand. Cause you know, you’re old friends now.

(P.S. Props to the inimitable Havi for inventing the word “Biggification”!)

And we drew it with crayons and pens. (Have I mentioned how much I love Portland?)

When I asked internally what I needed to be more visible, the answer I got was something like: “I don’t want to show up bigger in the world! All my projects are already too much and I can’t add anything else to my life! More people will want things from me and I will be overwhelmed and never have any free time to pet my cat and watch TV. Aaaahh!”.

I drew a picture of that (below on left). Then I drew what I wanted to somehow transform this issue into…a strong presence radiating light and energy from my whole being with a strong connection with my heart. Not at all crushed by an overwhelming weight of awfulness.

I should note here that I didn’t do the exercise exactly as instructed - I turned it into an intuitive exercise rather than an analytical/brainstorming exercise.

I wanted to find out what my body/mind/soul knew that my mind didn’t - and I find intuitive artmaking to be a particularly effective way to access that wisdom.

So next I asked myself “How do I get there? (to the shiny happy me)”. The drawing that emerged was a cave…

But it wasn’t just a cave, it was a tunnel. It led to somewhere radiant, but with a big question mark.

The answer was clear (if not specific): I had to step into an unknown darkness and have faith that I would reach the light at the other side. I needed to stop avoiding my fear and face it.

Facing a problem is often 90% of solving it.

While I’ve known I had a “visibility/showing up” fear/problem/issue for a long time, I had never really walked into it. I hadn’t investigated it clearly. I knew the cave was there, but it looked so dark and foreboding I never thought to shine a flashlight into it and see what was there and where it led.

Note: when I say “Face your fear”, I don’t mean “force yourself into a situation you are afraid of and try to bulldoze your way through it by suppressing your desire to run screaming in the other direction”.

That doesn’t work. And it’s likely to re-traumatize you.

What I mean literally is turn your face toward it. Notice it. LOOK at it. Sit with it. Be with it. Be present to it. Name it. Write down what it is. Make a drawing or painting of it, something to represent it. Meet it and have a conversation. Seek to understand it. What is it really? That’s what will bring it out of the shadows and make it into a normal kind of thing that you can deal with.

Looking squarely at something is the flashlight that turns a fearsome cave into a passageway to greater power and freedom.

I want to be clear that, at the time, I didn’t think “OK, I’m going to shine a flashlight on this cave and conquer my fears!”. Looking at the drawing, I was very much still going “eek!”. But I did make an internal intention to somehow turn toward that cave.

And I didn’t know what that would look like. It’s the intention that matters. You just have to start walking toward the cave with your flashlight.

Looking back over the past few months that I can trace that intention through many different small and large things that followed from that initial small internal decision to “turn toward it”.

Your intention doesn’t have to be specific. It can just be the intention to turn toward the issue and choose to believe you can face it.

That intention sets things in motion. And the most important intention you can ever have is the willingness to be committed to a journey that you don’t yet have a map for. It’s an internal vote of confidence in yourself to handle whatever comes up - and that confidence will lead you on. Fortune favors the bold.

In that moment I became willing to be present to whatever that darkness held–and it’s key that I didn’t know what it actually did hold. That’s why it was scary! It’s the fear of facing it that actually is the majority of the “issue”.

Once I actually looked at it (and that unfolded over a month or two), the fear faded away, and what was left was a set of completely do-able activities that would take me from where I was to where I want to be.

What I discovered in the cave: just some things I need to learn and get support with. Nothing all that scary after all.

OK, so what was in the cave?

• a fear that my life would become unmanageable if I added any more “inputs”
• a fear/insecurity that my writing wasn’t “good enough”
• an ongong pattern of oscillating between being overly-strict with myself and overly-unstructured

Thing to learn #1: How to manage inputs (and be more productive with less stress).

I was afraid I would not be able to handle what would happen if I showed up fully and said “YES” to more visibility and throughput. That my life would become unmanageable.

That had a very simple explanation, which was that my life currently is just not very well managed! Duh!

Well, it’s managed OK for the level I’m at, but to grow in my personal capacity to be productive, I need better systems.

The great thing is that people have studied that and it’s a totally solvable problem. I’ve been reading Getting Things Done, am completely in love with it, and am getting a handle on all the “open loops” in my life. That means getting all the “stuff” out of my head, into a system my mind trusts, getting “clear and complete”, so I have the energy to be highly productive on a regular basis.

I cannot believe how much of a relief it was to get that this is just stuff I can learn. It takes some time to develop the habits, but I don’t have to be come some other kind of person, who has some magical super-woman mad ninja juggling skillz. Or at least, I can learn the mad skillz. =)

Thing to learn #2: Healing some “stuff” around my writing, and undertaking some specific learning on how to write powerfully.

OK, this fear was kinda dark and murky and involved some grief work.

A few things converged in my childhood to give me a complex about my writing such that even when people said they got something from it, I would internally dismiss their positive feedback. Their words would glance off an internal shield that was protecting some painful wounds.

But once I got in there I realized it’s the kind of thing that nearly every creative person has to deal with at some point: past woundings around their creativity. I’m not alone in wondering, “What do I know? What do I have to offer?”

So I spent some time sifting back through those memories and letting myself feel the pain and grieve for the support, acknowledgement, encouragement, and validation I needed and didn’t get as a teenager trying to express herself through words.

It’s still something I’m working with, but I’m slowly letting in appreciation and it feels like a gentle spring rain. My fear and pain is softening into a gratitude for the grace of the Universe and a feeling of tenderness towards myself.

The second part of this is that once I accepted that a) I do want to write and b) I’m not the most awful useless writer in the world, I then realized c) I would actually like to learn more about writing effectively. Realizing you don’t suck is different than feeling truly competent, and the latter only comes with study and practice.

Thing to learn #3: Healing  and clarity around the issue of “discipline”.

If you think of discipline as self-parenting, I used to vacillate between super-loosy-goosy over-permissiveness and super-hardnose authoritarian rigidity. Like a pendulum swinging back and forth, each extreme would create a lot of unmet needs which would inevitably cause me to swing back the other way.

Not at all a fun cycle to be in.

Setting up structures and systems and organizing yourself really only works if you are consistent about maintaining them. So I knew I had to work through this if #1 was going to have a chance of working.

Healing this has been a long journey for me, and this is just the latest leg in it. I’m seeing it more clearly, and finally seeing the way out–the middle ground. A way to be with myself that is neither a forceful and rigid box or a spilling-everywhere puddle: I can build an organic container for my “self” out of sturdy materials, that can breathe. And I can maintain and cherish it (in a “your body is a temple/vessel” kind of way).

Ok, so I found a pile of rocks between me and the other end of the tunnel. But with my flashlight and some elbow grease and support, I can start moving them and clearing the way.

You wanna know the most magical thing about this process?

The Universe has totally showed up to support me in working through these issues. People, conversations, connections, insights, and resources have shown up to help me move those rocks: from describing what’s on the other side, sharing about their own tunnels and rocks, providing schematics and diagrams of how to remove rocks from tunnels, to giving me magic rock-dissolving pixie dust.

I firmly believe that if you humbly ask for support in healing something, magic will happen.

I say “humbly” because you can’t command the support. It’s more a willingness-surrender kind of thing. It’s the meaning of the phrase, “God helps those who help themselves”.

You know when they have fundraising drives on OPB and some sponser says they will match the donations of everyone who calls in?

That’s God. God matches your donation toward your own healing. God shows up in response to your will to heal and matches your efforts.

I think of the Universe as an organic system and we are all parts of it. The Universe wants to be healed, like people long to be free and like water seeks the lowest point. Because you are part of the Universe, you belong to it, it will help you to heal if you are willing to turn toward that part of you and let the water seep into the crevices in your heart. (And by “water”, I mean the healing principle of water/God, as in “The Tao is like water”).

Recap: 

1. Intuitive art helps you access knowledge you didn’t know you had.
2. Facing something is often 90% of solving it. (The other 10% is the work you then see you need to do).
3. Getting systems in place helps you manage your life and business so you can show up at a bigger level.
4. Healing creative wounds is entirely possible but it takes digging around in the muck a little and being willing to cry out the hurt.
5. The Universe will help you heal if you ask it and let it, and you don’t have to know how or why.

Note: this post is continued in: Fear of Biggification Part II: The Unresolved Stuff. No Tags]]> http://www.taoofprosperity.com/2008/afraid-of-showing-up-bigger-in-the-world/feed/ http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetItemData?uri=taoofprosperity&itemurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.taoofprosperity.com%2F2008%2Fafraid-of-showing-up-bigger-in-the-world%2Fhttp://www.taoofprosperity.com/2008/afraid-of-showing-up-bigger-in-the-world/ http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/taoofprosperity/~3/404027711/ http://www.taoofprosperity.com/2008/god-loves-weird/#comments Fri, 26 Sep 2008 19:01:41 +0000 Emma http://www.taoofprosperity.com/2008/god-loves-weird/

Did you know you could make your own bumper stickers at Zazzle.com? For $3.95? I’m going to town. Then you can sell them through their site. Click the link above and you can buy the bumper sticker for $3.95. (I make 40 cents). You could charge more though, if you wanted to make a whole income stream out of it. How frickin’ awesome is this?

This is how it’s going to go: the means of production will get more and more automated and inexpensive. The only competitive advantage that will always remain is your creativity.

So it’s imperative to get a clear channel open that creative inspiration can come through you. Because you can’t fake creativity. True inspiration comes through you, and you gotta be a willing and clear conduit for it if you want it to come through on a regular basis.

Get Willing

That means you get that you’re worthy. You get that you are unique and Divine and it’s OK to own your power and use it. You are good.”I am willing to create”.

Get Clear

This means having some means to get the distractions of life out of your head. GTD. Morning pages. Yoga. Meditation. Whatever it takes.

Ok but what about that “god loves weird” thing? I’m still wondering what the heck that means.

It’s like this: Diversity is sacred right order. If god was some kind of conformity-loving force, we wouldn’t all have such passionately divergent ideas and desires. We all share common needs and yet we all have preferences and strategies. Thus our sacred call is to discover and express our inner soul desires–and encourage each other to do the same. When we do that, we each increase the myriad beautiful manifestations of god.

Why are you not capitalizing God?

Eh. I go back and forth. I want to mix up people’s idea of God. It’s a word people have so many connotations with, and those connotations are often awful and untrue. I believe god is bottom up. And also, I just like to mess with people.

Why is this post so disjointed and suddenly full of FAQ?

Because I’m still trying to figure out a voice and style that I can produce consistently. Sometimes I try too hard to make it all perfect and shiny and then I never write anything. I’m trying to work on that. Consider this a work in progress.

No Tags]]> http://www.taoofprosperity.com/2008/god-loves-weird/feed/ http://api.feedburner.com/awareness/1.0/GetItemData?uri=taoofprosperity&itemurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.taoofprosperity.com%2F2008%2Fgod-loves-weird%2Fhttp://www.taoofprosperity.com/2008/god-loves-weird/ http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/taoofprosperity/~3/391886387/ http://www.taoofprosperity.com/2008/branding-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters-a-lot/#comments Sat, 13 Sep 2008 23:34:41 +0000 Emma http://www.taoofprosperity.com/2008/branding-what-it-is-and-why-it-matters-a-lot/ This post is in response to Mark Silver’s post Can Branding Ever Be Heart-Centered?

Mark wants to rename branding “worldview”. I don’t - I like the word “branding”. It means something specific - but maybe not what you think it means.

Your associations with this word might be from seeing graphical logos or “brand names” on clothing, or getting fakey-B.S. “we care” stuff from big companies who obviously don’t actually care.

This is not what branding is.

Branding is the visceral feeling someone has about your business.

Here’s an example. Some time back Qwest re-branded themselves with this whole “Spirit of Service” crapola. But when I called them to get help, I spent 1/2 hour going through a phone-tree, and finally got a guy in India who I could barely understand and was obviously rifling through an employee manual while talking with me, trying to figure out how to answer my question.

So the visceral feeling I have about Qwest? A crunchy-tense feeling in my gut, and an annoyed/indignant feeling that they lied in their advertising. That they were just trying to make more money, but didn’t seem to make any real changes in their customer service.  That’s their brand.

In the same way, part of Wal-mart’s brand (for me), is a questionable sense of ethics about how they get their cheap prices (like, from third-world sweatshops).

The key here is that branding is not what companies want you to think/feel about them, it’s what you really do think/feel.

So what is your brand? And where is it? It’s in the hearts and minds of all of your customers. It’s the sum total of all their reactions from all of their interactions with anything connected to your business and to you (yes, personal branding is a thing, especially for solo-prenueurs).

Branding isn’t abstract - it’s the real-world feeling people get from interacting with your business in any form whatsoever, from looking at an ad to browsing your website to talking to you on the phone. It’s the gestalt of YOU that they form in their head from all their different experiences. It includes their idea of what you offer (products and services), how responsive you are, if you are fun and playful, serious and committed, etc.

Branding is exactly where small businesses have a huge advantage over giant corporations.

Qwest does business the giant-corporation way. You don’t have to. You can do business exactly how you’d like a business to treat you. That’s why people choose to do their business with small businesses and independent providers!

Big companies resort to advertising to try to build a brand. To try to convince you to trust them. But do you? Not unless their advertising is backed up by their real-world actions. And more and more, it’s not, and that’s why people choose to buy from smaller companies who do still have the values they proclaim to have.

Ok. So how do you build a brand?

Branding is about consistency and focus (and the trust that they build).

To translate it into a different framework, NVC (non-violent communication), branding is “the needs people think will be consistently met by your business”. For example: integrity, compassion, generosity, spontaneity, humour, play, warmth.

Or they could be less touchy-feely needs, like vision, innovation, clarity, efficiency, ease, or exceptional value.

The consistency part meets peoples needs for predictability and safety. Which, of course, is the absolute first step to people buying from you.

If you send a customer a nice thank-you gift for instance, they’ll feel warm and fuzzy - that’s part of your brand then, in their mind - that warm fuzzy feeling. They’ll think your company = generosity.

If you do something inconsistent with that the next month (like give their 3 day overdue bill to a collection agency), you’ll dilute your brand. People will be confused. Uncertain. Scared. This is Not Good.

Get clear about a few specific things that define your brand. You don’t want to be all over the map, because you won’t be able to keep that up consistently. Sure, you can be playful one day, even if it’s not part of your core brand. But the things that are part of your brand, you want to bring into every interaction, and every product you offer, as much as you can.

For solo-preneurs, it’s important to pick things that are close to your heart, and easy for you to be consistent about. It really sucks to be not-yourself on a daily basis. For instance, I am not known for playful chit-chat when it comes to customer support. But answering questions clearly and honestly, and responding quickly and efficiently - that I am known for.

So get clear on who you are. Then, let people know about it!

For instance, if your strength is consistency, focus on that in your materials. If you have a special gift for being warm and connecting with people, make sure that is coming through on your website, your phone message, etc. Every little interaction counts toward their mental picture/visceral feeling of what your business is about.

Think about your brand as an investment - your brand is the principle that pays dividends - don’t spend it foolishly.

Think about Apple, one of the strongest brands out there. Do they ever release an inferior product? They could probably sell anything they released and make tons of money doing it. They have a huge customer base. But if they did that, it would dilute their brand. So they consistently make innovative, stylish, brilliantly designed products - and that keeps their brand strong. That way, when they release products, people are lined up at the stores camping out to get them.

So when you build up a brand, that is, you build a sense of trust with your customers and community, don’t waste it. Use it in a way that will leverage your business further.

Here’s an example of brand dilution I see sometimes: adsense or affiliate links all over a website, trying to make a few extra bucks. I am all for passive income! But it needs to be done in a way that makes sense - and that won’t turn people off - because that “turning people off” is now associated with you. So when you think about affiliate marketing, or anything you want to add to your site or make a part of your business, ask yourself: “Will this strengthen my brand or dilute it? Does it help my customers?”. Affiliate marketing, in the best sense of the word, is about recommending stuff to your people that they actually really could use and you can genuinely recommend.

I’ve learned this the hard way: if you recommend something and it turns out to suck? That is now part of your brand: “doesn’t do enough research on what she recommends”. There goes some of the trust I built. Ouch.

Then you get to learn to apologize to your customers and build trust by making amens - for instance, doing a lot of research that you can back up on what is a good recommendation, and looking through all the things you’ve recommended to make sure you still stand by them.

So, start to think about who you are and what your business stands for, and look around at everything you are doing in the world and see if there are things that you could re-align to be true to your brand.

If you want to get more into the topic, here is a fun little book on the subject: The Brand Gap.

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