How, What, Why
Are you rushing, slipping, catching your breath, urgent, last-minute, adrenaline fueled? Or are you patient, calm, planning ahead, ready, exhaling, easy? The difference between the two matters.
Mess-in-Progress
Friends, I’m in the process of updating my website, and it’s been a long time coming. This is not a sexy project. When people talk about being an entrepreneur, most of the time they talk about the new, shiny objects. The latest launches. The biggest revenues. The six-figure months. Not the boring, painstaking projects that require consistency, repetition, dedication. Or the cumbersome legacy projects like, “What do I do with all of these blog posts now?” and “What happens when I stop teaching courses, do I clean up my digital entrails that are all over the web?”
Strategies for Selling and Marketing More Effectively
What does having a successful online business look like to you? One of the hardest things to get right in business, in my opinion, is your marketing. It’s something that’s often left to the wayside, done as an afterthought, or purchased by brands and folks that think,...Away for a while
We’re preparing to add a second kiddo to our household! This coming Fall will be filled with a lot of newborn madness, alongside the extra bonus of having a very active toddler lighting up our lives. I’ve written on this blog for nearly eight years, but it’s time for me to take a break. I’ll be on hiatus from blogging regularly here for the next six months, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to stop blogging here entirely. If you’re on my email list, you’ll still get my subscriber-only monthly newsletter. If you want to read more about what I’m planning for the year ahead and how I made this decision, here’s a blog post all about it. It’s time to edit life, as always, and harness my energy towards my next projects.
Six questions for better conversations
The default American question “What do you do?” doesn’t suffice. Here are six of my favorite questions to ask people instead, and why they work. Asking people better questions is a great way into a more interesting conversation.
Screw the fairytales
In my twenties, I was on track to fulfill all the obligations of being a woman in this society: engaged to be married, great job, graduate degree education, wanted to have kids. Society was happy for me, and that ring on my finger was the icing on the cake. The problem? I didn’t like the job, and I was wildly uncertain about the prospect of getting married, even though I’d said yes to the proposal. Then, over the span of a year, I lost my rib (it was taken out of my body through emergency surgery), I lost my fiancé, and I found myself in completely new territory. What happens after the fairy-tale ending? In most books, my engagement would have been the happily-ever-after. Here, I had a new lease on life, and finally, slowly, started listening to myself and what I wanted, instead.
How you move through the day
There are many ways to go about a day. It’s not always as important what gets done as it is *how* I am showing up, and *who I’m being* in the process of all the doing and non-doing that I’m engaged in. In my mastermind circles, we call this “ways of being.” We work through three major phases and processes in our work together, which I describe in this post.
July Book List
July was a busy reading month. I was focused on recording and prepping interviews for my upcoming maternity leave, and with all the extra interviews scheduled, I had quite a list of books I needed to read to prepare! Here’s the complete list of books I read over the last month: one of them, Overwhelmed, is one of the best books I’ve read so far all year.
What will teach you more?
Instead of trying to make the best possible decision based on an estimated guess of an outcome, it’s important to remember that we can’t control the outcomes. (If we could, then planning, marketing, and making would be far more boring and predictable.) Instead, I like to ask this question in order to make decisions in the face of uncertainty and unpredictability.
Join me! Live podcast show in New York City — Thursday, August 9th
Friends! I’m joining the host, best-selling author, and founder of Unmistakeable Media for an intimate evening podcast recording of the Unmistakeable Creative Show. We’ll be taping live in New York City on Thursday, August 9th, after work. Join us. Tickets are sold in advance and are first-come, first-served, with an intimate venue and a limited audience size. Yes, I’ll be staying up late and waddling my big pregnant belly to a stage downtown to talk about startups, parenting, philosophy, and systems. Srini Rao is the bestselling author of Unmistakable: Why Only Is Better Than Best, and will be leading the discussion.