You are currently browsing the category archive for the ‘persistence’ category.
One of the most telling comments I’ve remembered over the years regarding ‘the voices’ we (all) hear in our heads was the speaker who suggested to skeptics, “You know…the voices. Like the one speaking to you right now saying you don’t have any voices in your head. Those voices.”
I have yet to meet anyone who’s swimming solo out there.
But the voices disguise themselves very well. We believe them, that they’re actually our thoughts and some form of higher wisdom. I don’t know about you, but my voices never reinforce the powerful intuitions I receive, the hits of creativity and originality, the inspired thoughts that come my way. In fact, they’re each about one car-length behind those more generous thoughts with their specially crafted brand of negativity and advice.
On Monday night, April 2, my Remarkable Women’s Network theme is a Gremlin Tea Party. I’m inviting those critters in, along with 30+ remarkable women, to duke it out. As a longtime coach, I know how to deal with these saboteurs. My coach calls them con artists. Whatever name they go by in your vocabulary, they’re dream killers, and I want to exact revenge.
During the evening I’ll offer several strategies for confronting these voices. Five women business owners will be offered the chance to coach with me on how to deal with statements like these that come out of the mouths of those creatures:
- “Who do you think you are?”
- “No one will pay for that!”
- “You call yourself an expert?!”
Everyone there will benefit from the strategies and tools I use to deal with these impostors. I’ve done it before at my goal setting retreats, and the transformation is palpable. Like throwing water on the Wicked Witch of the West. These mean-spirited entities dissolve and disappear when they’re called out in public.
I hope you can join me next week (register here for one of the few remaining spots) or send a comment and let me know your familiar voice’s ‘advice’ to you.
I’m truly looking forward to my JV (Joint Venture) call tomorrow evening with Gail Doby. I was referred to Gail by Victoria Lyon who I met at a SHE-E-O luncheon created by Carolina Fernandez, who I met as a referral through Gene D’Agostino many years ago. Have I hit six degrees of separation yet? This name by name analysis is to demonstrate what it takes to become successful. One of my mantras is: Follow All Leads.
Each of the relationships along the way has been gratifying and productive, and now I’m here, sponsoring a call by Gail this Tuesday at 5:30pm EDT.
Gail is a business role model for me for where I’d like to be in a year or two. While I’ve created, offered and completed my first webinar series, Gail already has multiple webinars in her inventory. She also has recorded interviews with industry experts to add to her clients’ knowledge base . Her mailing list is at least quadruple mine. She has a partner who understands the technical back end of her business. This serves as a complement to Gail who excels at the creative and front end for the team. I admire what she’s accomplished and believe that she is ahead of me on the path I’m pursuing.
Her talk tomorrow night is about setting fees and avoiding the disasters that can come up for business owners who aren’t comfortable in this arena. Who doesn’t need that? Gail has been in the interior design industry for years and has created strategies and content that address this issue, along with multiple other issues, that soul proprietors like you and me face daily.
From my conversations with Gail to date, I see that we approach business from different perspectives. I’m particularly excited to hear hers on this subject. I hope you’ll join me. There’s still room. (Click here to register.)
Colin Campbell + Caldwell Esselstyn - The stars of Forks Over Knives
I’m back from 7 glorious days on the MSC Poesia attending the Holistic Holiday at Sea cruise to the Caribbean. It would be hard to isolate a highlight of this experience, because it was day after day of education, meeting fascinating people, eating exquisitely prepared vegetarian meals, and touring the islands of St. John’s, Puerto Rico and Nassau.
But if you absolutely insisted on the quintessential takeaway, I would have to say it was the inspiration I got from hearing the two amazing men pictured here talk about their experiences.
With the documentary film entitled Forks Over Knives, Colin Campbell and Caldwell Esselstyn are changing the way Americans eat. Both transformed themselves from early childhoods on dairy farms into becoming experts on plant-based nutrition through research (Campbell) and medical practice (Esselstyn). Their independent efforts via The China Study (Campbell) and the Cleveland Clinic (Esselstyn) prove with thousands of case studies and statistics that heart disease and cancer can be reversed through diet. Which, they both acknowledge, won’t get most people to make the necessary changes in their eating habits, but it has helped significant numbers improve and extend their lives after severe diagnoses.
It was Dr. Esselstyn’s personal story particularly that I found powerful. He shared his struggle of getting the invaluable information he’d been studying for years out to a very resistant public, including seven calls to a doctor at Harvard he wanted to reach.
“Never get upset with the secretary,” he advised us, even though his frustration level had clearly escalated during his period of prospecting this person.
Dr. Esselstyn and his wife Ann (who was on board throughout the cruise) personally taught his patients how to cook and eat a healing diet. They took an interest in each individual in their study, called them regularly. One memorable segment depicted a woman who shared a journal entry from the day she was in WalMart, determined to indulge in a meatball grinder when her cell phone rang, and it was Ann Esselstyn calling–at that very moment– to see how she was doing. Needless to say, she never had that sandwich and was strongly converted by the level of concern and interest shown by the Esselstyns.)
The China Study has garnered great media attention for these men, decades after the hard work they put in (and continue to put in). The bigger message I got from their talks and their presence was that when you’re living your passion and making a contribution to society, the material rewards may or may not come, but the lives you are changing will be gratifying beyond words.
In today’s NYTimes obituaries, the man who helped us understand the danger of aerosol sprays to our environment is remembered:
F. Sherwood Rowland, whose discovery in 1974 of the danger that aerosols posed to the ozone layer was initially met with disdain but who was ultimately vindicated with the 1995 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, died on Saturday at his home in Corona del Mar, Calif. He was 84.
I believe that Campbell and Esselstyn also deserve the Nobel Prize for their heroic work in proving that these human and economy killing diseases can be reversed through diet. Disdain–they’ve already confronted that. Vindication is occurring daily. They have my vote.
I love watching a conversion.
In the first module of my webinar series I talk about creating a vision for your business/life. I offer two methods for doing that–a vision board or a written statement. This week I had the opportunity to review visions with one of my webinar participants, Sandy Lovell.
Sandy has been very successful in her career and was in a transitional phase when she signed on for my class. I could tell from our conversations that she was holding herself back, not dreaming big enough. During this week’s Q+A session, she admitted to having begun, but not completed, the vision board assignment. I counter-offered, and Sandy said she was willing to write a vision statement instead which included outrageous, stretch goals and desires.
As we talked on the phone, I suggested a weekly massage as part of her self-care regimen in her vision. She simply laughed at the preposterousness of the idea. Although it felt too indulgent, she promised to add it to her written vision.
Sandy joined in again on the next Q+A call and immediately opened the conversation with, “You won’t believe this! I did what you said. Wrote the vision statement, and in today’s email, I received a groupon deal for a massage. I signed up. How did that happen?!”
It’s The Secret in action, the law of attraction. That you bring into your life what you think about. Writing it down and cutting and pasting pictures of your desires hastens the process and directs the universe–and your attention–towards your particular longings.
Tomorrow I leave for an envisioned vacation. I’m traveling to the Caribbean for a cruise – Holistic Holiday at Sea. Years ago my table mate at EWN told me that every six weeks she takes a week off. I made a mental note of that ambitious and luxurious goal and am beginning my own manifestation of it. I was a guest presenter at a spa in Mexico in December, now vacationing in the tropics in March. Not quite six weeks, but wonderfully in the right direction.
I’ll be out to sea for a week. No phone. No email. Nothing but the ocean, nature and R+R. I highly recommend your following my lead as often as possible.
Like this:
Old Ongapotchket Site
After many months and many meetings and many decisions, the new janepollak.com is alive and well and hopefully worth your valuable time and attention. It feels as though my last website went up only weeks ago, but it’s been six years. It was time for something new, fresh and more adaptable to today’s social media opportunities.
My mother used a lot of Yiddish words when we were growing up. The one that popped into my mind every time I pulled up my old site was ongepotchket (uhng-guh-potch-kit), which can mean too fancy or ornate, fussy, overdressed, overdone. What I had it mean in my head was “too much going on.” After four years of plain and simple, I had my assistant add the logos from the media outlets that had once featured me. Then, when the revised edition of Soul Proprietor came out in May 2010, we threw the new cover up there with links to amazon.com.
The site got cluttered and messy looking–ongepotchket–so every time I clicked on my home page I had to squint so as not to notice the clutter.
And then, you just know, it’s time to re-group and re-launch. I hired a wonderful marketing/branding company to work with me, and I’m thrilled with my new look. It’s congruent with the cover of my book. There’s no more ‘egg’ symbolism. And we’ve added a lot of video and social media connections to stay abreast of the times.
I hope you’ll spend some time checking it out, send your friends, sign up for a free webinar and/or hang out with my remarkable clients sharing their experiences on the youtube clips.
Welcome to my new site!
Like this:
You’re probably thinking, what does this subject line have to do with entrepreneurship? But, the essence of this question arose yesterday when I received an email from one of my webinar participants inquiring why I’d combined my two groups in one private Facebook page. That is, the ones who’ve been in the program for 5 sessions with the newer students who are only up to Session 2.
In 1997, while attending my first ever NSA annual meeting in California, I attended a workshop where the speaker talked about his career development in terms I’d never heard. He knew that he was using high level language and explained, unapologetically, that his job as a motivational (and I use that term thoughtfully) speaker was “to keep the Toastmasters running after the caravan.”
That image became seared in my mind. Here were the paid professionals holding forth and allowing us newbies to press our faces up to the glass, to mix metaphors, and see what being a pro looked like. It felt aspirational. These NSA’ers had what I wanted, and by joining them and attending their meetings, I was going to learn what they knew.
It had me breathless in anticipation and effort to keep up with and master the arenas they were all playing in. I loved that I got to rub shoulders, listen in and ask questions of the pros. I’d much rather play in a tennis game with someone better than I am than someone not as good. Don’t we all want to up our game?
So it is with intention that I combined the two groups who are participating in my webinar. One group has had four more sessions than the other, are deeply engaged in comparing notes, sharing successes, products and resources with each other. It may be a stretch for those who are newer, but my objective is that it become an invitation as well as a temptation to grow and join the conversation.
Like this:
I met with a group of women business owners recently, where one participant whom I know and adore, shared a challenge about how crazy-busy she is. She felt frantic and incapable of prioritizing. The proverbial fires were all burning equally in her arena. Taking time to deal with one over here could cause a huge conflagration over there.
I could feel my stomach begin to get knotted up.
And then I realized that I didn’t have to fix this for her, nor do I believe she desired a solution. She wanted to vent, to be acknowledged, understood and appreciated. Don’t we all?
I asked her permission to share an observation, which she welcomed. “I’ve known you a good 20 years, Barbie (not her real name).”
She immediately interjected, “And I’ve been complaining about this issue all along, haven’t I?”
I nodded. “What I get about you is that this is how you thrive. You’ve been wildly successful in this competitive and male-dominated industry you’re in. You’ve always made your deadlines, and you actually seem to thrive on the chaos of it. Why not re-frame your attitude about the situation and enjoy the ride? Instead of beating yourself up for not being better organized, how about some new and different self-talk? Try saying, ‘I’m really good at dealing with a million balls in the air. I always pull off these presentations. All nighters are the price of admission in this field. And I love it!’”
I wasn’t sure what kind of reaction I would get from that piece of truth-telling and coaching, but Barbie’s face went from drawn to relieved. She felt heard and understood and didn’t have to change a thing about her work method, except her attitude about it.
When I emailed her this morning to ask her permission to share the incident, this was her reply:
You certainly may blog about it!! I can’t tell you how great it was to hear your words!!
Last Friday night I went to Debra Somerville’s photography Studio Opening event in Westport where lots of chic patrons, friends and family helped Debra ‘break in’ her new space. One of the very cool things about the opening, in addition to Debra’s brilliant photographs on the wall, was the interior design by a young man (under 20!)
He, Sam Allen, was recently featured on the CBS morning news. Part of that segment was taped in Debra’s newly designed space. When asked what her friends thought of her hiring a teenager to take on such a high stakes project, Debra, who already knew of Sam’s massive talent replied, “I didn’t tell them.”
One of my newest friends, Joan Blumenfeld, invited me to her 80th birthday party which had been months in the planning. First of all, you’d never believe Joan is 80, and second, the party featured her dancing partners from the Fred Astaire studios, as well as her dance-mates from the ballet classes she attends regularly. When Joan spoke that night, she gave us five tips for staying young. My favorite–which she demonstrates so gracefully–was “Keep moving!”
The other amazing friend who was celebrated recently is Malene Barnett. She was on the Nate Berkus show yesterday, and what a great job they did featuring her and her work. I’ll let you watch it and see for yourself. Can I tell you that I knew Malene ‘when’. It is exciting and inspiring to see this piece of film that captures her journey, her talent and her creativity so well.
Life is good!
Joan (on left) at one of my Remarkable Women's Network events
One of the things I love about getting my news now via the Times Reader is that, unlike when I read the paper edition, I’m able to immediately click on the links that are highlighted.
Reading an inside scoop about the director of the hit movie “The Help”–Tate Taylor–I did just that. I clicked on the blue lettered hyperlink in the sentence that said “the director Chris Columbus, a producer of “The Help,” was eventually dispatched to be a full-time on-set babysitter.” How diminishing must that have felt? To be directing your first feature film and having someone watching over your shoulder the whole time. I wanted to know more.
The link sent me to an article from the Wall Street Journal entitled “How An Author’s Best Friend Turned ‘The Help’ Into a Movie.” Getting juicier. I’ll let you read the whole piece, but what really made me happy–having seen the movie and knowing that it was a huge hit–was Taylor’s “biggest takeaway from the whole experience”:
What’s meant the most to me in this whole process is that people I don’t know sending me letters and emails saying “I was about to quit the business. It’s changed so much. It’s so jaded. It’s so economically driven. The art has been lost. And I heard what happened with you and your friends and Kathryn and DreamWorks…and I am refueled.”
Our personal struggles and triumphs serve as a power of example to all those watching. I take great heart from this story of how two friends (kind of like Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney) got together and put on a show. They overcame enormous challenges and were generous enough to share their story. Does that make you feel just a tad better about what you’re struggling with today?
Like this:
My son got mad at me a few years ago when my newsletter column listed 100 things I was grateful for, and the UPS guy was ranked above my kids. Let me say at the outset of this post that I am grateful, first and foremost, for my family members. (Happy, Rob?)
Recently, though, I’ve had an overwhelming sense of gratitude for the ease that technology has brought to me and my business particularly. (It was likely Steve Jobs’ untimely death that brought that to the forefront of my mind.)
After giving my free webinar a few weeks ago, I gave my first official webinar on Thursday evening, and I felt like I’d found a new home. I had over 20 participants listening from their phones or computers in locations as far away as California and Texas and as close as New Hampshire and Stamford, CT. Those who missed the live event were sent links to a recording that matched the audio and visual components. No more need to worry about scheduling. Everything is available to participants whenever they have time to access it. This is HUGE!
Using Easy Seminar, a website designed to handle all the pieces of webinar communication, I was able to see who was calling from where, what time they signed on, if they had their hand up and were muted or unmuted. While I’ve attended calls where similar technology was used, I had never looked ‘behind the curtain’ to figure out how to do it myself. It’s really cool!
In addition to having a national audience, I’m able to create slides using PowerPoint and upload them to this site. We’ve created a private Facebook community where webinar participants can share their thoughts, encouragement and questions with each other. I was able to lift their photos from that social network to use for this slide which I showed the group when describing my ideal clients.
I first had to use PowerPoint in the late 90′s when I was still a computer novice. I went to an ‘expert’ to create my visuals for a program I was giving in Buenos Aires. I was beginning to learn the basics, but definitely needed his help uploading photos, creating transitions, etc. I had zero idea of what I was doing. I remember asking him if it would be possible to make ALL of the backgrounds of the slides black. I was such an amateur. I posed the question with such gravitas, as if I were asking for the password to Fort Knox. The ‘expert’ definitely played his part to the hilt. Rather than truthfully telling me, “Yeah, I just need to press duplicate slide 20 times,” he kind of grunted and groaned as if there were great effort required to make yet another slide background black. Knowing what I know now, I’m blushing at how little I knew.
That’s part of the gratitude. I’ve taken multiple classes over the years to get up to speed on technology. Now, I love going to google and writing in the slot, “how do you do a screen shot on the mac” and having the answer pop right up.
Is there a piece of technology you’ve mastered recently or are particularly grateful for this year? I’d love to know.
