Day 8: 30 Days of Nature

My morning walk greeted me with these beautiful sunflowers 🌻 along the route. #30DayNatureChallenge

Day 7: 30 Days of Nature

Day 7, #30daynaturechallenge Beach time is always good for a reset.  🧘‍♀️ #beachtime  #slowloving #millerbeachindiana 

Focusing On Where We Are Right Now

43 days straight, just over 7 hours and 48 sessions. That’s how much I’ve been able to commit to daily meditation since I started in late December. This may not seem impressive to many people, especially those who practice meditation regularly. To me, though, this is HUGE. It’s the longest stretch I’ve been able to keep meditating and while there are days I just don’t want to set aside the 10 or 15 minutes, like any physical exercise, there is never a time I’ve not felt it’s been worth it. Never. In fact, most days I’m looking forward to the forced stillness.

Yesterday afternoon I spoke with an editor of mine who has become a dear friend (and if she’s reading this right now, she knows who she is!). I hadn’t meditated yet and I mentioned that sometimes I wonder if this meditation thing is working because I’m not sure how it should feel if it is (or isn’t).

Then, yesterday evening, when I finally did meditate, the dreamy accent of the person behind the Headspace app starts off by reminding us we need to be “focusing on where we are at this moment, rather than how well we’ll progressing.” It’s like he knew how I felt and overheard my conversation! Like when you read your horoscope on your birthday and think it’s been written just for you! He reminded us to stop judging our progress because that’s where we get into the zone of frustration and stress.

Trust The Process

Even if it doesn’t always feel like I can get this meditation thing right, even if it doesn’t always feel like I’m able to focus for one minute, let alone 10, I continue to meditate. Why? I knew I needed to make changes in my life after last year.

Perhaps you know the feeling? Have you ever felt like sometimes we’re on a hamster wheel? Going through the motions and checking off the boxes but not feeling like we’re actually going anywhere? I lost a client I had been working with for years. One I loved and long respected and admired. Until something happened within their organization and it all came crashing down. Out of my control, but still, it was a painful reminder that no matter how much of our heart and soul we put into something, it can be lost in snap. We were doing great work together, checking the boxes, going through the motions and then, poof. It all came to a screeching halt and it felt like I got whiplash. That’s how much if 2018 felt for me and why I wanted to put things in place early this year to make changes.

Meditating is helping, even if I can’t really see exactly how. I can feel the changes. I can feel that I’m calmer (yes, my word of the year!). I’m reaching out to organizations who align with my interests and values in the sustainability and social justice space because those are the places where I want to focus my energy and work. Have I secured new work with any of those organizations yet? Not yet. Do I think I will this year? Absolutely. Why? Because I trust the process. I know what I’m capable of doing and I know the decision to bring on a communication consultant is rarely done in a vacuum or without thought about how to budget for it.  But I know for sure that if I don’t continue to reach out to those organizations and let them know I’m available, the odds of me having the opportunity to work with them will be considerably lower. So I continue to put the time and energy because I know if I stay with it, something will happen.

That’s why I continue to meditate.

Consistency Matters

Much has been said about quality over quantity. If you want to produce good work, put the effort in and produce good work. While I don’t disagree with the sentiment, I also know this is a numbers game. You want to run a marathon? You have to log in the miles. You want to become a better writer? You have to write. You want to secure better clients? You have to let them know you’re available. Not just in December or January. But every month. Because you never know when that call will come that tells you thanks for the five or 10 years of working together, but this will be our last month.

Last night I was at the rock climbing gym where my kids practice as part of a team and I overheard their coach pushing one of their teammates to try to finish a challenging route. She was so close, just one step away from making it to the top, but she didn’t feel like she could finish it and was going to let herself fall off the wall. Her coach wouldn’t let her. “Try, just try,” he said. Buoyed by his encouragement, she tried. She didn’t make it and ended up falling off the wall.

“You’ll fall the same distance if you try and don’t make it,” he reminded her. “But you might make it, so why not try?”

Even if we don’t always hit those high notes or finish those routes or secure the clients we want or the stories we pitch, we have to keep getting out there. We have to keep trying. Consistency matters. And so does focusing.

What are you hoping to try this year? Have you taken any steps in January to inch closer to making it happen? Anything I can do to help? Let me know! Until then…stay warm, friends! 

Commitment and Focus: 2016's Goals

Writing out my goals at the beginning of the year has allowed me to stay focused. Before I accept or consider a new client or project, I look back at my goals and ask whether working on this project will help me get closer to meeting my 2016 goals.

One of the things I committed myself to doing this year was to focus on my five “top goals”. We all talk about things we want to accomplish in addition to our regular commitments, whether it’s work with our clients, regular assignments from our editors or our involvement with the community. The reality is that we’re already busy so how do we gain the bandwidth to add yet another things to our already-overloaded “to do” list? We can’t – unless we plan for it and make time for it.

Last year was such a professionally and personally-rewarding year for me. I stretched, reached and proved to myself that I had what it took to make things happen. Things that I’d be working on for years finally seemed to fall into place. I don’t believe in luck. I believe that things happen when you plan for them. Maybe not immediately but eventually, when you work at it, they do.

In December, I decided to hire a business coach to help me synthesize and focus my goals for 2016. She helped me realize that I don’t need to do everything in 12 months. Rather than 9 goals, we pulled them back to 5 goals. The others would be pushed to the following year. Notice I didn’t abandon them – we just put them on the backburner (she calls it the parking lot) so we could focus on just 5 for this year.

Then she pushed me further and asked me to put together a timeline with action steps for each goal. What would I do this week, she asked, to push along each of my goals to fruition? Did I need to reach out to someone for more information? Did I need to read a media outlet in greater detail because I wanted to secure a byline in that outlet? Who might be able to help me achieve my goal? Did I need to attend a new conference to meet people who might be helpful in meeting my goal?

None of her ideas or prompts is revolutionary but having that out-of-my-circle feedback has been invaluable. My coach and I don’t have a professional or personal relationship outside of a network of female writers. I reached out to her because she’s planning a conference I’m seriously considering attending and she mentioned that if I needed help with my goals, she offers coaching services. I knew her work and respected her as a professional writer and I wanted to talk to someone who I admired and didn’t have any agenda outside of helping me hone my focus.

Since I don’t work in a traditional office, I have to find ways to grow outside of getting just receiving general feedback from clients or editors. I invest in myself through classes and professional conferences. A friend and I started a monthly writers accountability group. I’m very active in professional associations.

Through it all, though, I still wanted to talk to someone who didn’t know me or my work well and could be objective. Am I insane to think I could crack into any of my 13 “bucket list” publications? What do I need to think about and to my book proposal so it can shine and find the right publisher?

The Benefits of Outside Perspective

One of my goals for this year was to formalize my own marketing services. In addition to my now wildly-popular 52-Week Marketing Monday Checklist for Independent Retailers Subscription, I’m offering one-on-one coaching to small businesses interested in incorporating a robust marketing plan to their business plan. 

The idea behind this goal came about after several retailers asked me to help them craft their own marketing plan because it wasn’t financially feasible for them to hire a marketing and PR consultant like me.

Having an outside perspective isn’t just smart, it makes good business sense. Rather than constantly being “busy” doing things we feel we should be doing, working with someone outside of your daily grind helps them see what’s blocking you from moving ahead and also gives you a different perspective as well as ideas on what we can done better.

Now, every Sunday evening, I open my Passion Planner, review my week ahead and PLAN FOR IT with my goals in mind. I also schedule time on my planner to specifically work on my goals. I don’t work on all of my goals every day or even every week, but they follow me week by week so I can be reminded of them and I schedule things I can do to help push my goals in the forward direction.

How do you focus and commit to the goals you want to meet this year?