life lately

Whew!!

There's been a lot of "life lately", it's just not happening here on this blog, at the moment. But it will again, now!

My cousin Maile posted over on her blog the other day, that she realized it had been a year since she'd last posted. I never thought someone could forget to blog (kind of like how I still don't think people can forget to eat, but, you know, whatevs). I mean, I used to blog like I used to breathe! But now, I get it. Time goes by and other things (like spending time with your significant other, and getting projects done) take priority.

So, these last few months, pretty much since the day my crowdfunding campaign began, have been Busy with a capital B, for me. But not like "So-insane-I'm-going-to-have-a-panic-attack" busy... which is a nice change from how I used to do "busy"! Just more like, "I'll do my best, some things will take priority, and some things will fall by the wayside, and that's OK." That kind of busy. I've learned a crap tonne. About productivity. About what to say NO to. About my future business. And my current business. And my relationship, and what's important to me, like really truly important.

And, now I feel I'm out the other side of it, of that busy-ness. I'm settling back into my seat as a blogger, a writer, a creator of things, and it's comfortable, it feels right. I want blogging again. I want it to be part of my daily life again.  And I'm actually excited again to share what I've been learning, and going through, and seeing, and feeling, with you all.

So first up! I want to talk about what goals I'm working on. You know that feeling when you get through a busy period, and then you want to take a deep breath, and slow down, and look clearly at, well, everything? And decide what stays and what goes? Yeah, that's the feeling I have right now.

So here is a bit of a brain dump for what's on my mind, in my heart, and on my plate for the second half of 2015. I'm not including stuff from my day job -- that's it's own long to-do list and while it's at times interesting and exciting, it's not what I want to talk about here.

• Finish all the work for the crowdfunding perks. Date: end of this year. (I'll post a longer post about this whole process soon.)
• Get digital photos for the last seven years made into photo books. Delete the digital versions of the photos. Stop worrying about losing them! Date: end of 2015.
• Put a couple of older posts from Dream Big Cape Breton onto "goCapeBreton.com" -- maybe a beaches post, the post about the transportation system.
• Launch and then run a successful first year of the Creative Soul Weekend, with Emily Chafe.
• Launch my business (October!!! Watch out world!)
• Grow a small veggie garden and plan a bit for next year's veggie garden (get tarp, put rock around the corner of the yard where it will go)
• Go on vacation in August with Adam and check email only once a week. Pack super light. Enjoy and soak up the moments. Let the time away from things be refreshing.
• Keep working out twice a week with my rad new trainer Steph. Do an unassisted pull-up. (Maybe by the end of this year, it may take longer.) I don't have a specific weight-loss goal, because my goal with training is to gain strength and muscle, which may not mean any change in the number of pounds I weigh.
• Keep doing yoga once a week.
• Be "hands free" as much as possible when at home with my family. We want to grow our family in the next year or two, and I've seen over the past year that the more hands-free I am, the more connected Adam and I are to each other, and the richer our family life feels.
• Look into starting a podcast.
• Look into doing an extended walk, perhaps around the Cabot Trail, in 2016.
• Look into writing a book. (!!! This one in particular feels SCARY to say out loud. But yes. I really really really want to write a book.)

Whew! That's a lot. But damn it feels good to be back. Writing in my own blog, my own account, again. Let's do this!

I want to be a social media consultant, yet I don't look at my Facebook news feed (very often)

And that's totally OK.

In "It's Business Time" (the 6-month intensive business-development program I'm in) we're at the point where we're defining what we want to DO. As in, for money. For reals. With a website and everything. And for me it's designing logos, and doing social media consultations. And writing, my own blog and my own writing.

And oh my, how the Vampire Voices rise up at that!!

They say, "But! You kill your Facebook news feed! And you work to spend less time on social media, not more! So... why would anyone pay you real money to tell them what to do with their social media?"

(Vampire Voices are assholes, by the way. The way to deal with them is to say, "Well, thanks for the feedback, but I got this.")

Later on down the road as I'm writing my sales pages, I'll get into things like how I still get lots of Likes and followers, and how my content still gets shared. And I'll get into what I do personally, to stay enough "in the loop" as I need to be, but also to take nice long breaks from what feels, often, like overstimulation. And I'll talk about my thirteen years of experience blogging and sharing things online, which is a rich catalog of memories, attempts, fails and successes.

But for now, on a Friday afternoon, let me just tell you this: whatever your personal equivalent is of my fear of "But I can't be a social media consultant if I keep my news feed killed!", it's not true. You get to flip the script. You get to create what you want, from boundaries to blog posts, to businesses.

xoxo and have a great weekend!!

Leah

Photo at top of this post is from my copy of the Get To Work Book.

on "quiet bravery"

On my business coach Tiffany's podcast this week she talks about something she calls quiet bravery. And she asks her listeners what that means to them. I love this idea and I've been thinking a lot about it, so Tiffany, here's my answer!

Quiet bravery for me is: letting my blogging find its own rhythm again, after posting nearly daily for three years on my last blog, Dream Big Cape Breton. And what "finding its own rhythm" means is: I'm trying not to get all bent-out-of-shape up inside my brain about how often I'm posting (or not posting), and trying not to worry that I'm not posting enough and that I'm losing followers. Because the best way to lose followers is actually to post all! the! time! whether you have something to say or not. The best way to lose followers is to give them a watered-down, exhausted version of yourself.

Quiet bravery for me is: Taking Keltic Drive to work instead of the highway, so I can drive a bit slower, and look at all the apple trees, and glance at people's yards. And doing this drive without music, without podcasts, so I can just be with myself.

Quiet bravery for me is: Spending my evenings (as much as possible) off social media and away from email, so that I'm present in my house, with my family. And, trusting that that is enough, that the social media will be there when I get back to it. My ego and my sense of myself get quick, addictive hits of pleasure and validity from checking social media, so it's kinda hard to step away from it. But when I do... it feels oh so good.

Quiet bravery for me is: Being OK with not sharing publicly the process I'm going through, just yet, with It's Business Time. The other day at an event I was at, someone who follows me online said, "It seems like you're just remaining open right now," and I said, "There is actually a lot happening behind the scenes!" And there is: so much good stuff, introspection and group calls and writing our first offers and really sinking my claws into the meat of starting a business, into the act of pulling a real live business out of dreams and hopes. And I definitely want to write more about it, but where I thought at the start of it that I might do a diary sort-of-thing as I went along, well, I've realized it's pretty private and that I don't want to share it all just yet.

But then, because, you know, life works like that, I read Elise's post today about developing your ideas, and she recommends talking and sharing your ideas. And I happen to agree. I think we don't develop ideas alone, in a vacuum, and that the more we put stuff that we love out there in the world, then the more people  around us know we love it, and then they come to us to talk about those things. I wrote about this last year on the Dream Big blog here. 

So quiet bravery for me also means talking out loud about the new ideas, even if it's not in perfect-packaged-diary form. Even if it's just talking it out to see what I love and what I don't. Especially if it's those things.

So in essence, quiet bravery means slowing myself down. To listen to my own voice. To see how it has changed over thirteen years, and what it's changing to next.

Bravery actually takes less energy, because it means being who I already am. But it takes bravery to say, "And that person? Is a damn fine person."

Life Lately

Lately I'm...

Creating lots of materials at work at Horizon: posters, web graphics, print materials.

Picking away at the list of freelance side work to do. One piece at a time, the list is shrinking!

Listening to podcasts, and the sound of the rain.

Going Hands-Free at times to spend time with my family. (Adam and Mittens.)

Being conscious of my time on social media and finding I'm just as effective with only 20 minutes a day.

Watching all the green growth in the gardens and the woods.

Working on the It's Business Time work and feeling really excited about what's to come for me in the next year.

In disbelief that it's already June, and the year is half over.

Growing out my bangs... I tried them, they were fun, but ultimately I'm a super low-maintenance gal when it comes to my hair.

the 20-minutes-a-day experiment

I'm in week seven now of "It's Business Time." ("It's Business Time" is the group coaching program I crowdfunded in order to take, a month and a half ago. My thoughts on week one of the program are here.)

Week seven! That's crazy. Where does the time go?!

Anyway, today is Friday and every Friday the group of us meet on Uber Conference and talk for an hour. In our call today, my question for the coaches was, "I want to help people with their social media, as part of my business, but I don't want to be a social media expert who has no life outside of social media. I want balance. Can that exist?"

One of the coaches, the rad Tiffany Han, replied by challenging me to find out for myself. She said, "Try only going on social media for twenty minutes a day, for the next two weeks, and see if you're as effective on it as before."

"Does that include writing blog posts, or checking email?" I said.

"No, just the platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest."

I tried to bargain, saying, "Well, how about an hour a day?"

"Nope." Tiffany was firm. "Twenty minutes."

"Fine, fine!" I said, laughing. "I accept!"

And to be honest, as much as it scares me, the idea also excites me. I've gone off social media other times, for various lengths of time. And I've tried to just be conscious of my use of it, and limit that use. But I've never done it exactly like this before.

The idea is scary, because although I hope for balance, I definitely fear that in order to use social media for business, you need to be on it all the time, that you need to be available to people all the time.

But what if that's not true?

And what if I can learn methods for balance, and help other people with this 'pain point'?

We'll see. Twenty minutes a day, here goes!

when I started

This pin.

And this blogger. Aaaand this one too.

What do these three links have in common?

They light up my fingers and my brain, at the same time, and they make me go, "OK, write, now."

Yes, in bold.

I've been thinking a lot lately about ... other ways to say, "I've been thinking a lot lately about..." Any tips?

Haha, but seriously, what I was going to say there was, I've been thinking a lot lately about blogging, and about getting back to what brought me joy with the medium, wayyyy back in 2002 when I first started putting my thoughts out into the interwebs.

In the meantime, so much has happened.

I mean, I wrote my way somewhere, through thirteen years of living. For three of those years I wrote my way through a question, "What if more people thought positively about Cape Breton?" I shared parts of my life and shared parts of others' lives. There's a real bulk to all of that, that I can look back and really see.

And then, in December of 2014, when I decided to stop writing Dream Big Cape Breton, I turned a corner in the writing, in the voice I used to put myself out there in world. And I stopped, for a bit. I felt like I had reached a wall, and couldn't go forward yet, because I knew I wanted to change things up, but I didn't know what that would look like. So I just kinda... stopped. And started, and stopped. I had just moved into a new home but hadn't put anything up on the walls yet, or moved in furniture, or done much besides sit and stare out the window. Because I was scared. I felt like "people" were watching and waiting, to judge.

Now I see. After just one week of posting daily, about whatever I want.

I see that I want to keep writing my way along. It's a slightly different voice, than it was before. But it's still my voice. In fact, it's more my voice, now, than it was before. If that's a thing. Being more or less a voice.

So my question for myself is, what brought me joy back in 2002? 

Words? Truth? Telling stories?

Truth be told, I'm not overly SURE what it is exactly about blogging that brings me joy, I just know that there is this feeling I get when I am writing. When my fingers are tapping away at the keys. It's a mix of "I'm in the driver's seat here!" and "Wheeeeeee!!! I'm just along for the ride" and "Hmmm, what's around this corner?" and "What time is it anyway? I'm not even paying attention." It's a good feeling. It's exhilarating.

And I know that when I let the voices in my head start to go on about "Well, who is really reading this blog? What do they want to hear about? What should you write about?" and worry about all of it, that's when the writing dries up. That's when the joy dries up.

Erin Loechner writes in her amazing post, "why I blog":

It’s selfish, perhaps. But this year, something shifted. I began blogging for me again. To connect with myself, my own voice, my own story. To document this time of growth and learning and perspective. To think deeply about the legacy I want to leave my daughter and to allow myself the grace to grow into that new version of myself – one that isn’t measured by pageviews and valued by comments. One that is littered with intention and thought and gentleness with words. One that is slowly realizing she was made fearfully and wonderfully, created for a purpose.

One that is finally understanding the importance of telling your truest story.

"One that is littered with intention and thought and gentleness with words."

I love that.

And I love blogging.

And that is all I need to know, right now, and always.

Picture at the top of the post is from this post by me, on my old blog, from February 2010.

My biggest fan

   This. This is what made my day today. A dusty, non-oscillating, basic fan. A fan that normally lives in our bedroom, but which I brought out, plugged in and set on my kitchen counter, pointing it straight at me while I finally got to the pile of dishes that had been crustily and greasily accumulating. On the first real hot day of the season. This fan made my day.