The Travel Log's New Home

Twisting Road Travel Log is now found at the TwistingRoad.com site.

Packing Up And Moving

Moving day for the TRAVEL LOG is officially here!

You will find all future TRAVEL LOG articles on my hosted website here.

This blog has been housed on Blogger for nearly two years. Back in June I set up a hosted website for my e-mail newsletter On The Twisting Road, including a sub-address for the TRAVEL LOG. Since then I’ve posted my weekly update on Blogger and on my hosted site.

This is the last new post I will put on Blogger. I will leave the Blogger site up with the archives of the TRAVEL LOG for a while as I move them to my hosted site.

I’ve already managed to move the first three months. It’s slow going, since I have to post them one at a time. I looked at moving the whole blog but the information I found was discouraging.

For anyone starting with a new business idea who is considering a blog, I have a recommendation. Having tried three popular formats, Blogger, WordPress, and TypePad, I have chosen WordPress. This is mainly because I can put the blogging software on my own hosted site.

If I had started with a free WordPress blog, I would be able to migrate the whole thing to my hosted site. If you’re considering starting a free blog and think you might want to host it on your business’ site once you’re up and running, I think that’s a good way to go. TypePad has a great structure and is very easy to use, and the information I read makes it seem fairly easy to migrate a TypePad blog to your own hosted site with WordPress software. But at this time, you can’t put TypePad software on your own site. If you want a TypePad blog, you have to host it on their server.

This week had the theme of packing up and moving, and I’m pretty sure it will be my theme for a while. Not only am I moving the TRAVEL LOG archives to my hosted site, I recently closed down my TypePad account so Anything But Marketing! is only found on my hosted site.

I even have a lot of packing and moving planned for my home office. I rearranged the furniture months ago and set up my workstation in the guest bedroom. I made a list by section of the room for going through books, files, supplies, and binders to sort things out and organize them. But that’s about as far as I got.

It’s sorting and sifting time for me this coming week. I will be clearing out old things and either storing them or tossing them out. I’ll be going through reminders of the successful child care business we sold a few years back, which will be bittersweet. I’ll also be going through reminders of the “business opportunities” I tried, including the ones that collapsed as the parent companies were taken over by the government for fraud. I’ll relive the foolishness, the gullibility, and the desperation that made me susceptible to those scams. And I’ll relive watching thousands and thousands of dollars disappear.

It’s gonna’ be a tough week. And it will probably take more than one week to get it all sorted out. But once I’m done and my office is focused on my coaching and training business, I won’t have to dig through bad memories to find my telephone bill or the stapler. I’ll be focused on the future and on a business I chose after a long process of listening to my gifts, talents, and passions.

That’s the vision I will hold in front of me to keep me going as I clear out the clutter of the past.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Back In The Sandbox

In April I wrote a post called Having Fun In The Web Design Sandbox. I was getting brave messing around with HTML code, aiming personalized URLs to blogs I had on other sites, and getting a little more control of my SteveCoxsey.com site. This week I’ve been getting dirty all over again!

It all started because the end of the month came mid-week, and when I was going over the budget – yes, it’s boring sometimes, but it’s also really important – I noticed I was about to pay my annual hosting fee again for my SteveCoxsey.com site. I hadn’t done much with it besides changing the template and making a few tweaks to the text since I learned how to play around with it back in April.

I wanted to redo it completely and take down the “Contact Me” form. Those forms were probably a good idea in the past, but the internet vultures have found a way to use mine to send me several messages a day that are either garbled nonsense or the worst version of SPAM I’ve ever seen. I wanted that form gone. I wanted to have full access to the control panel. I wanted the ability to screw it up in any way I possibly could!

So I transferred the hosting from my web guy, to whom I am very grateful for getting me going on training wheels, to the hosting company where I have my two blog-zines. If I were on top of things, I would be an affiliate of the company and I would have just put an affiliate link in this post. Boy, I can see how I should “Always Be Selling,” but I can’t quite make it happen.

I was wiped out with a virus Thursday and Friday, and I had just enough energy to go to my younger son’s soccer games on Saturday before I had to stop and rest. Sunday was my older son’s game, so by the time I was feeling nearly well on Sunday evening I was way behind on first of the month tasks for my small business.

Of course that was the perfect time to focus on playing in the web sandbox. I purchased the hosting and messed around with redirecting my e-mail. I had to stay up late to get it to work, but I finally managed to have the e-mail routed through the new hosting company. Good thing, since that’s my business e-mail address. The site was a different story.

I had to place a call today to the hosting company to have an error message removed every time I tried to access my site. The customer service rep helped me out and made sure I had access to install files for my new site. I looked at a lot of templates and then decided to install WordPress. I spent way too much time choosing a theme and then customizing parts of it. I’m nowhere close to done yet, and I may change it completely, but I’m feeling connected to my site again.

I also managed to take a lot of steps reformatting Chasing Wisdom, but the changes won’t show up for a while. I’ll be rearranging the articles to make the site easier to navigate, and then I’ll start publishing more issues of that blog-zine.

There were times when I was looking at templates or WordPress themes and thinking I was wasting time, maybe even goofing off. But then I remembered I’ve been wanting to make significant changes to both of these sites for months. It takes time because my approach to choosing a design layout is “I’ll know which one I want when I see it.”

I still take a lot of time making changes to the layout of a theme once it’s installed because I have to experiment with different things on the stylesheet to see if what I’m doing is making the right changes on the page. I haven’t mastered these skills; I’m still struggling to learn them.

Fortunately, struggling to learn them is a lot of fun.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Scenic Turnout

Today I rounded a corner on the Twisting Road and came across a wonderful view. I pulled over to get a better look and realized there was space cleared out to the side of the road to park. I got out, looked a long time at the scene before me, and breathed in. As I breathed out, I let go of tension and worry and enjoyed the moment. It was just the right time and place for a scenic turnout.

Reprieve From The Muck

Great news! The articles and assignments I was reading for the Finding Your True Calling study group were the wrong ones! The wrong page numbers were sent out by mistake. So all that muckiness wasn’t necessary, and thank goodness I can forget about it. Except I can’t, and I shouldn’t.

Mucky Times

Every week in this blog I try to reflect on what I’ve learned as a solo entrepreneur, whether it’s planning or purpose or new technology. This week I’m still too much in the process of discovery to be able to share much insight or any conclusions. I’ve been spending more time exploring the exercises for the Finding Your True Calling study group. I stirred up a lot of memories and powerful feelings about my past careers. I’m in the mucky process of self-discovery, and I think it’s important to let you know it’s difficult and confusing at times. It’s too raw and too personal and too cluttered to explain yet, but I think it’s leading me to more continuity and to greater clarity with my purpose and vision going forward.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

If Money Were No Object, How Big Would It Be?

I signed up to participate in a group through the
Fast Track Your Dream program. We’re going to be reading through a collection of articles and essays titled Finding Your True Calling. I read through this book several months ago and tried some of the exercises, but not all of them. I skimmed over one in particular, but this week I’ve been focusing on it seriously.

The purpose of the exercise is to help people hear what they’re drawn to, what their heart enjoys. It’s a simple enough idea, but it’s deceptively tricky. It goes like this.

If you didn’t have to worry about money, what would you do with your time? After taking time off and traveling and relaxing, how would you want to spend your days?

The premise is a person who doesn’t have to work will still want to be productive and will be free to do things that express natural gifts, talents, and passions. The problem with the premise is that it’s really hard to let go of considering money.

I’ve tried different versions of this, but I get distracted by rabbit trails. One version I used was to imagine winning the lottery and having enough money to generate a huge income, say a million dollars a year. When I think about it, I get stuck on how I would set up managing the money, how I would choose people to advise me, and how I would donate big portions of it. That turns into real work, having to learn about more complex investments. I wonder if I would enjoy that part and might discover a passion for investing in commodities or small cap stocks, or if I would really like being a venture capitalist. I completely lose the point of the exercise!

When I think about the giving part, I wonder if it would be better to set up a foundation and support certain organizations, or if it would make more sense to travel to see the work that different organizations are doing and just give directly to them, or if I would find unmet needs and be moved to set up an organization to serve those needs. I take my pretend philanthropy very seriously!

I tried this exercise from another point of view. I imagined I had a wonderful inspiration and wrote a best-selling novel and would be getting big royalty checks and just stick them in some kind of trust fund and have a big flow of income. What would I do then? I started imagining how I might write a second book and make even more money!

A couple of times when I’ve set aside time for entering into this thought exercise I wind up thinking of the things I would do with a huge income, like screen in the front porch and build an outdoor kitchen in the back yard. I start daydreaming about new cars and travel destinations. Again, I miss the point.

When I think about plans I have for building a coaching practice and adding training and information products around career choice and entrepreneurship, I find another obstacle. I realize that for the exercise to be effective I need to add, You don’t have to worry about marketing your service or product, because your reasonable efforts will definitely be effective. I needs this because I start out imagining setting up training workshops and not having to worry about the income, but I get pretty disappointed thinking about nobody showing up!

I am learning much about myself, and I’ve only written a small portion of it here because some of it is still pretty personal and a lot of it isn’t totally clear yet. I know that the more I stay with this exercise the more I’m discovering my limiting thoughts, false preconceptions, and fears. I realize I need to bring my thoughts about risk into awareness so I can evaluate them and make them more realistic. I see more and more where I automatically filter my own gifts, talents, and passions through the “practical” lens, which takes a way a lot of their power.

I recommend trying different variations of this exercise. They can guide you in your own journey to discover your authentic work. And they can point to your thoughts and beliefs about money, scarcity, abundance, and security, which are important to uncover when you’re trying to embrace liberty and live with intention.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Labor Day

My day to post this entry will be Labor Day. That’s a day set aside to celebrate the labor movement and workers’ rights. It’s also a day many people see as the official end of summer – at least the more relaxed vacation season. For many it’s the start of the year, since school is back in. It’s back to work time! What a rich irony for those of us who are creating work around our lives instead of fitting our lives in around work.

Our older son has gotten an after-school job at the local grocery store. He has soccer practice and games (I think I’ve mentioned that a time or twenty) that limit his availability so he’s tried to be very clear about when he’s available to work. His one certainty was that he wouldn’t work on Sunday. It’s a family day and it’s very often a soccer game day so it was off the table.

When he checked his schedule for the week on Saturday it was the same as the previous week. He saw it while working that evening. When he came home he said he would have to go up after his soccer game Sunday to change it because of soccer practice conflicts. When he got home from his game on Sunday around 5:00, he had a voice mail on his phone saying he was scheduled to work from 3:00 to 11:00. He quickly showered and rushed off to work without any food – he hadn’t eaten since around noon on the way to the game – and without the chance to have water or a sport drink with him at work.

I don’t want my son hating his job. I want him to be treated with some basic respect and decency and I want him to connect earning money with his goal of having his own car. I even want him to see the value of increasing his earnings through education and specialization and entrepreneurship. But I don’t want him to hate this job!

We told him that, if they don’t get the schedule worked out where he won’t be working right after he’s been playing soccer, he’s going to have to quit the job. The scheduler said what she was told about his availability and what he told the manager during his interview were different, but it’s straightened out now. In one week of a part-time job he’s experienced the essence of the drudgery of corporate America. Poor communication, insincere commitments, and passing the buck so the lowest guy on the ladder carries the responsibility of other people’s mistakes. Eureka!

My wife told me many people she’s talked to in the past few months who have high school and college age kids working report similar stories. Their sons and daughters are given schedules that don’t match what they’ve said they’re available to do, and they’re expected to work or they’ll risk losing the job. A friend of mine has been hearing similar stories, as well.

I’m getting feisty! The labor movement brought significant improvements to the workplace, but it’s still a workplace. The sense of an adversarial relationship between employees and supervisors lives on in too many places. Even a high paying job with great benefits is still “a gilded cage,” as my friend Henry says.

I have a renewed passion for spreading the American revolution by helping people find their calling, discover how they bring value to other people, and make their living doing something they love. Whether that’s a creative job with a lot of freedom, self-employment, a small business, or multiple profit centers, it’s freedom from being treated like a number. It’s the freedom to respect what we do, and to work with honor and dignity. It’s the freedom to own our own work and take charge of our lives. The ultimate labor movement is entrepreneurship!

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Detour!

Sometimes the freedom of the Twisting Road means you get to try a new route to see how it works. And sometimes the freedom of the Twisting Road means you get to take the route off your plan when it doesn’t work out for you.

I have been using an autoresponder for several months now to send out my newsletter, now titled On The Twisting Road. During that time I’ve seen a slow but steady trickle of new subscribers coming in, which seemed great, considering I have not used any pay-per-click advertising or search engine optimization to get potential subscribers. Heck, I don’t even have a free give-away to entice people to sign up!

I noticed recently that some of the new subscriber names were things like “Casino Nights,” and later they were the names of – how to be prudent? – enhancement drugs for men. So I finally paid more attention to my autoresponder and what’s happening.

It turns out most of the new subscribers never actually opted in the second time. That means a name and e-mail address were entered and put on my “waiting list,” which shows dozens of people, nearly one hundred. But they don’t go on the list to receive the newsletter until they click the link to confirm their subscription. That list is just a dozen.

Looking carefully at the list of unconfirmed names and e-mail addresses, it appears they are the equivalent of S-P-A-M. For example, the name might say “Dave” but the e-mail address is “Tony@provider” where the provider is something like “Mail.com.”

I’ve been spending two dollars and fifty cents per actual subscriber per month (about thirty dollars) to send out e-mail using an autoresponder. The first lesson I learned is: pay close attention to the information on new subscribers to see if they are real. I assumed they were real until they started being named after pharmaceuticals.

The second lesson I learned: don’t get an autoresponder and then sit around waiting for people to sign up. I didn’t need an autoresponder to send out my e-mail until I got to around fifty names. I’m not there yet, now that I checked the list carefully. I could have sent the newsletter manually until I was ready to focus on building my list. Money wasted.

The third lesson I learned: automated nonsense garbage comes to you in many forms, including sign-up forms and contact forms as well as blog posts. I have gotten increasingly more responses through a contact form on my web site. They are either nasty ads or meaningless gibberish with links to web sites. I have started getting the same kind of nonsense as comments to my blog posts. They say things like, “I agree. Couldn’t have said it better!” where such a comment is not related to the post, and there are imbedded web site URLs.

I’m going to pull down the contact form from my web site – as soon as I figure out how to do it! I know how to change a page, but I have to figure out how to remove one. I have the blog comments on “moderate” so I see things before they go public, which keeps these nasty ads and garbage off the blog site. And I have decided I’m going to shut down my autoresponder account so I can save the thirty dollars per month until I’m ready to build a list.

Didn’t I write a post somewhere about doing things in the right order? And didn’t I write, in that same post, about the difference between having a plan and just using tools with no clear plan?

Absolutely I did! And absolutely I got sidetracked and detoured by jumping in too soon to an autoresponder.

Hopefully this will keep one of you (and there are more than a dozen who read this blog – it’s not just my confirmed newsletter subscribers!) from wasting money paying for a service before you need it.

But you know what? If you do start using a service or a tool before you have a real purpose for it, you’ll be learning and growing and figuring out what’s right for you. That’s a big part of the fun anyway.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

I’ve Got To Stop Reading!

I set aside the three (or so) books I’ve been reading consecutively after I spent a little time at Barnes & Noble evaluating another book. I’ve heard about it for years, even picked it up a couple of times, but never read more than the flaps and maybe a chapter introduction. But once I committed to looking closely and started reading, I was mesmerized. Two days later I was deflated and, well – forlorn.

The seemingly innocuous book is The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It by Michael Gerber. I first heard about this book a few years back. I was told it was groundbreaking, even revolutionary, for people who wanted to run their own business (this might even have been before it was “Revisited”). The problem is, the people telling me it was revolutionary misrepresented it.

They described it as a book that smashed the belief that people have to have an entrepreneurial nature to be successful at business. They told me it showed that most successful business owners aren’t really entrepreneurial. It doesn’t take special vision or a knack, they said, just good planning and management.

When I skimmed the book back then, I couldn’t make much sense of it. Turns out that’s because the people who were excitedly describing this book didn’t have a clear idea of its theme. The “myth” is easily misunderstood.

As he develops his ideas, Gerber proposes that people start businesses when they have a burst of entrepreneurial inspiration, but they quickly fall into an employee mindset. He doesn’t use that phrase, which I picked up from Barbara Winter. I prefer her way of explaining it. Because they think like employees, they get an idea to start a business and wind up building an overwhelming collection of jobs.

As the ideas in the book develop and solutions are offered, it seems that the myth is that entrepreneurial innovation makes businesses work while the truth is that mundane activities make businesses work. There is a section where the solution to business development difficulties is…. (drum roll)… to be like McDonald’s!

That’s when I became forlorn. To have a successful business, the books seems to say, I have to develop carefully crafted, routinized operations that can be taught to any willing person. Creativity and variation must be supplanted by regimentation. This is shockingly close to my view of hell, so I wanted to shred the book.

But that doesn’t actually capture the myth. To be successful developing a business, Gerber says a person has to balance entrepreneurial innovation with a mundane, orderly management mindset and the technical skill of the worker. Successful business developers are entrepreneurial, but they are not only entrepreneurs. Thank goodness I kept reading!

In fact the stages where the business is designed on paper, where each step is planned and then implemented and experimented to get it right, is a creative process. Once every detail is defined and specified, ongoing innovation is used to test better and better ways to provide a more satisfying experience to customers and more clearly express the business owner and developer’s underlying mission.

And there, finally, is the myth explained. The myth is the belief that most businesses are started by entrepreneurs who risk money in order to make a profit. The truth is most businesses are started by people with an entrepreneurial, innovative spirit who are trying to express something about their view of the world and how it can be. They just don’t know it! So they unconsciously try to put their signature on every aspect of the business by doing everything themselves because they don’t believe anyone else can do it their way. They burn themselves out.

The solution, it seems, is to make the unconscious expression into an intentional purpose, put the attention to detail in designing and planning how the purpose is expressed in each function of the business, and then share the vision with others and train them in the system.

Once the theme got back to self-expression and creativity, I was greatly relieved. I just never thought of the perfect crispiness of McDonald’s French fries as creative self-expression before!

Now I understand the myth and the solution. This process of business development makes perfect sense for someone who wants to create a business that other people will run. The developer expresses himself or herself through the system developed with such specificity and detail that his or her vision can be implemented by other people in a consistent way.

But I can’t get it to connect to the idea of solo entrepreneurs, those of us who are self-employed and work directly with our clients. When you personally work with clients you don’t really have a business you can sell. You have a practice, into which you can bring a partner or from which you can make referrals or to which you can add associates. But that is not something you can sell outright. It is something you may be able to transition slowly and carefully from one primary provider to another.

In coaching circles, new coaches are told often that we have to remember we have a coaching business, especially those of us who have had therapy practices. The distinction is meant to increase a focus on marketing and customer service. However, since I work with people who are self-employed and people who own small businesses, and with people considering becoming one of them, I have to make a finer distinction.

Coaching is a practice. Selling information products is a business. I can pour my vision into the details of operating a business that develops information products, finds products created by other people, offers them in carefully targeted marketing, and makes the experience of buying and receiving the products consistently pleasing to customers. And that is something I could sell, because it would be a system other people could run.

But a coach is the product. Once I have enough history to have dozens of former clients who have completed coaching and have a full schedule of ongoing clients, I can’t sell that to someone else. This helps me evaluate marketing and business development ideas and sort out what applies to a coaching practice and what doesn’t. I’ve been frustrated with some of the ideas because they just don’t fit, but I hadn’t understood why. Now I do. It’s just a little more light on the twisting road ahead.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

When Discovery Is The Destination

I’m reading The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective Families by Stephen Covey. Since I’ve been a proponent of personal growth and development for most of my adult life, it surprises even me that I haven’t read a complete Covey book before. I think it’s due in part to my suspicion of “quick-fix gurus” and I mistakenly thought Covey slid into that category. Also, since I heard about him in a corporate management context, I wasn’t very interested. I wasn’t thinking creatively or expansively. Yeah, I know.

One Covey theme I knew already was “begin with the end in mind.” I embrace that approach when I ask one of my favorite questions, “To what end?” In this book he uses analogies of trips without maps and construction without blueprints. If you don’t know where you’re headed, you’re not going to get there. Fair enough. But lately I’ve been hearing people’s struggles as they try to figure out the work they’re born to do. They’re ready for change but don’t know where to head yet. How do they begin?

There are real and compelling stories about people who were working, often pretty successfully, at a job that was unsatisfying and unfulfilling. So these people made radical changes in their lives, changed careers, often to something unique and creative, and are now enjoying what they do and feeling more alive. These stories resonate in the hearts of those of us who believe in fulfillment but think ours feels like a faint memory of a dream. We think, “I want that, too!” And we look for the path to get to it.

The path is laid out. Take time to remember what naturally intrigues you, the things other people can tell are your gifts; think about ways to offer that to other people as products or services; come up with a reasonable plan to gather information and start doing the new thing part-time; and then grow it so it can replace your income and you can do it full-time.

It sounds reasonable. It makes perfect sense. And then a lot of us get stuck on the first step. While other people are in some sort of Mastermind group or other support format to keep them moving forward as they plan and then start a new career, we’re watching from the sidelines as they carry their certainty and enthusiasm thinking, “How’d they do that?”

The discussions I have with other people in this same situation point to something missing. Coaching is available for people who have a vision and maybe a goal in mind but need help developing a plan and implementing it. Therapy is available for people who are so overwhelmed by stress, depression, or self-defeating doubts that they don’t think they can make any changes at all. But what’s available for the people with normal anxiety and normal doubts who just don’t have any idea what kind of work they would enjoy?

As my wordsmith friend Darcy put it, “I wish there was someone who could just help me talk my dream out of myself.”

And this, alas, is my conundrum. What do we call that field?

As I went through the self-discovery process to find what work was a natural fit for me, I realized this is what I most want to do – help people rediscover their dreams and make them real. I thought that would be counseling. Counseling is broadly about promoting healthy growth and development. Many of the techniques of counseling were developed to help with insight and self-awareness, from the belief that increased self-awareness increases opportunities and personal control, leading to greater ability and mastery and freedom. It’s the path to self-actualization.

But counseling has become mostly psychotherapy. The guidelines for Licensed Professional Counselors in my state are written almost solely around the practice of therapy, so much so that when I called to ask questions about how to practice counseling that is not reparative or based in assessment and diagnosis, the people at the licensing board didn’t have clear answers and weren’t sure. The questions were new to them, which tells me the idea is pretty rare.

I'm still enthusiastic about coaching and am studying it because it includes a lot of personal discovery and self-awareness, but it is biased towards achieving goals so much so that the insight and awareness are almost by-products, not a primary focus.

The resolution? I don’t have a clear one yet. But I plan to struggle with the definition of a career that includes activities and steps that are focused on self-discovery and expanding insight. In a world where we are cautioned that we are more often “human doings” than “human beings,” it should be possible to make it a priority to become better at being. It should also be possible to honor the value of expanding self-awareness and insight through a process of self-discovery.

I’m certain there are a lot of people who need this, including all of us who have struggled or are still struggling with figuring out our natural work. There is an intersection of personal growth coaching and personal growth counseling. But there aren’t any streetlights here. I’m going to have to get out my flashlight and sketch what it looks like.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Humbled By The Twisting Road

Since the theme of my articles on creative work and self-employment is the “Twisting Road,” imagine how humbling it was for me to be driving on twisting roads for the first time in several years during my recent trip. It wasn’t very much fun, and it seemed like a huge nuisance.

My sons and I left a week ago this past Thursday and returned home this past Friday afternoon. It was a whirlwind trip that included college campus visits, four days of soccer tournament, a trip to the beach, and a long drive home. And it included stretches of driving through the Great Smoky Mountains.

Portions of the highway through the Smoky Mountains twist and turn a lot. They are not as severe as the roads in Arizona around Sedona and Jerome, or the roads in Arkansas around Fayetteville and Eureka Springs. But driving a Suburban full of luggage and soccer gear through the twists and turns while trying to stay on a schedule brought to mind my previous twisting road drives.

On the way to North Carolina I focused on the negatives of driving twisting roads. On the way back to Tennessee I focused on the positives. Here are what I remembered from driving twisting roads that apply to creative work and self-employment. I knew these things intellectually but hadn’t incorporated them fully into my work life. I hope I learned them at a deeper level this time so they “stick.”

• Mountains are annoying obstacles when you’re focused on a deadline.
• Mountains are beautiful and majestic when you slow down and focus on them.

• Twisting roads seem threatening and risky when you see them as something to confront.
• Twisting roads are enjoyable and perspective-changing when you look forward to them.

• Rain added to twisting mountain roads on a deadline generates anxiety.
• Rain added to twisting mountain roads with no deadline adds to the majesty.

• I automatically see twisting mountain roads as a gauntlet and get anxious.
• I have to make a conscious choice each time to see twisting mountain roads as an opportunity for a special experience, but when I do I am greatly rewarded.

The Friday we arrived in North Carolina for the soccer tournament I had just a few minutes to think about what I would write for this blog, and immediately my mind returned to the drive through the mountains. At that point I only had the anxious obstacle view of the road. I thought about the fact I named my newsletter and this blog after the Twisting Road, and for a while I felt totally foolish.

The whirlwind of preparing Friday night for Saturday’s game set in, and I didn’t have time to think about this blog again until we were headed home from the beach. Part of the reason was the good play of my son’s soccer team. They advanced to the semifinals so they were playing soccer for four days. We left for the beach shortly after their final game.

On the way back my mind picked up the self-deprecating thoughts about the name Twisting Road and I started haranguing myself again. What were you thinking? You drove tight mountain roads for a year and a half and know it can be nerve-wracking! But I thought about the reasons I chose the name, including the glorious views and breathtaking moments of rounding a corner and seeing a valley open below and mountains rising in the distance. The last leg of Wednesday’s drive was into Asheville, North Carolina in the dark and in occasionally heavy rain, through tightly twisting highway. It was hard to keep positive expectations up, but I resolved to enjoy the drive into Tennessee the following morning.

I did, although we had some heavy rain and a little light rain along some of the twistiest portions. But my sons were excitedly looking for hillbillies, and then trying to identify nuts growing densely on trees lining the ridge, and then spotting homes built near the many rivers and streams. Just before we left the twisting pass through the Smokies, we saw mist rising near the top of one mountain that was so dense it looked like smoke. I had been explaining to my sons that the haziness and blue cast of the mountains in the distance gave them their name, and had tried to explain how mist and clouds played a part. When we saw the dense rising mist after the rain no more words were necessary.

Following your calling is difficult. Being self-employed is challenging. Trying to have an authentic life is not all sweetness and light. It’s intimidating, it’s anxiety-provoking, and sometimes it’s lonely since it’s hard to connect with people down in their ruts. It’s a daily conscious choice to take the more difficult path, or to create a new path, and it is slow going. It is very demanding. But it’s also vibrant. It’s creative and it’s exciting. Taking on this challenge helps work be fulfilling.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

What A Time To Make Big Changes!

My first step at communicating about my new career was starting this blog as Chasing Wisdom. I did that before I was even clear what my new career would be. I narrowed my focus to personal development coaching and renamed this blog Twisting Road. I started a Blog-Zine at Chasing Wisdom where I wrote about creative career choices, self-employment, getting along with money, mentorship as leadership, and time management.

A few months back I started an e-mail newsletter, On The Twisting Road, to focus on creative careers, self-employment, and entrepreneurship. That led to some important questions, like What’s the difference between Chasing Wisdom and my e-mail newsletter? and Do I still need both of them? I finally sorted out my ideas and make some big decisions. But why in the world did I choose now to put them in place?

This is a short week for me since I will leave on a road trip (yes, another one for soccer) with my sons. I will be gone for several days – and I will be hoping that the road there and back is only twisting in symbolic ways! That means I will have a delay in implementing the changes I planned, but I wanted to go ahead and get started.

I set up a site for creative career and entrepreneurship articles and resources at TwistingRoad.com. I set up a sub-domain to host this blog, which started on Blogger. I will be slowly moving all the old posts there so it contains the complete archive.

I set up a separate sub-domain at TwistingRoad.com for my Anything But Marketing! blog, which I started on TypePad to learn that format. I love it, by the way, but enjoy the freedom of having my site hosted and installing the blogging software. TypePad doesn’t allow me to do that.

The biggest change I have planned is for Chasing Wisdom. During coaching class exercises, I realized my early vision for Chasing Wisdom got clouded as I started adding topics about creative career transition. My broader vision is to use it to write about creativity and authentic living. I want it to be less about “how-to” and more about “why-to.” I hope to be able to include excerpts of creative writing and more stories about artistry. It will be more about psychological and spiritual development and may even dance with philosophy from time to time.

I’m going to decide which sections of Chasing Wisdom to share with the Twisting Road e-zine and start moving them over. I will leave previous issues of Chasing Wisdom in place, but the style and theme will shift going forward. Chasing Wisdom will sit patiently a while longer while I focus on getting Twisting Road set up. I’ll announce its return when a new issue is ready.

Next week I’ll be in North Carolina and I’ll have my old laptop with me. If I have the time and can get to a free or relatively inexpensive internet connection I will post here and send out my On The Twisting Road e-mail newsletter. If I don’t get the chance, I will at least sketch my article and finish it when I get back. Having this record helps me when I need to look back and see what I was thinking before. Hopefully it helps some of you see one man’s journey to a creative career and self-employment, including all the detours and false starts as well as the forward motion.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

“Duh!” And The Power Of Coaching

Talking with other people is an important part of making a wise decision. We all need the additional information and the new perspective of good counsel. But not all counsel is good! We have to listen carefully to tell which part of the response is wisdom.

It’s kind of like asking someone to recommend a good restaurant. You get some good ideas, but you learn a lot about other people’s preferences and priorities. If you ask a more affluent friend who doesn’t worry so much about cost, she might recommend a place because of the extensive wine list and the exotic types of seafood. Ask a different friend and he might recommend a brewpub with dozens of beer choices, great burgers, and live music on Friday nights. Ask a different friend and she might recommend a new Thai place, while a fourth friend might have an old favorite “hole in the wall” he loves because they serve authentic Mexican food.

You certainly learn a lot doing that – about extensive wine lists, live music, and good Thai and Mexican food. But you don’t necessarily get your answer. Were you looking for a place to take guests from out of town to have a unique local experience? Were you looking for a place to entertain business clients? Were you trying to find a place to celebrate an anniversary? Your question is unique to your experience.

The past several days I’ve had the opportunity to notice some of the different ways people act when talking to someone with a challenge or a question. One of the most common is rambling story telling. Unfortunately for me, I’ve noticed it in myself as much as in other people. It works like this. Someone describes a situation that just happened or one that’s coming up soon. One of the listeners, or even eavesdroppers, jumps in and starts recounting a long tale about something more or less similar. There are rarely any good suggestions and rarely any valuable lessons learns, just a lot of details of the experience.

Another way of responding is similar but actually more annoying. A person pipes in with personal experience plus all the things he or she now knows that everyone else must do in the situation. It sounds something like this. “I had that problem when I was planning a trip for business. I got the run-around until I talked to a supervisor of group sales. That’s the key. It has to be a supervisor of group sales. Trust me, if you don’t do that you’re just wasting your time. That’s the only way I’ll handle it now.”

A third way is less immediately annoying and more insidious. Somebody who has no personal experience, has not read up on the subject, and has not done any research to get good answers, says, “I’ve heard that the most important thing is…” This could be a response to someone trying to decide about starting a blog or an e-mail newsletter, or someone deciding where to focus time and energy in a part-time business, or someone deciding how to define his or her target group for clients. The recommendations are often a paraphrase of some company’s marketing message, the one that’s trying to get you to buy their service. They’re also based on articles with “tips” for small business owners written by people with a corporate perspective and no understanding of solo entrepreneurs.

For example, someone might say, “I’ve heard the most important thing is to be able to post to your blog at least once a day.” Or someone might say, “I’ve heard it’s important to choose a target group that is very specific, like attorneys over fifty who love outdoor activities.” One of the most common is, “I’ve heard it’s really important to put your money into setting up a professional-looking web site so people will think you’re a big operation and not an individual.” That one seems to be rooted in the mistaken belief that it’s necessary to mimic corporations in order to be successful. Little proof is offered, because what “I’ve heard” is usually someone else’s unsubstantiated bias.

I’ve noticed one other action-deferring response lately. It’s the game of “Find the Expert.” A person is thinking about starting to use an autoresponder to build an e-mail list and send out regular information to prospects and clients. Someone says, “A colleague was talking about a class on online marketing and they covered autoresponders. I can find out who is teaching that class and get you the information.” A new business owner comments that it might be time to choose software for bookkeeping. Someone says, “I know a consultant who has a virtual assistant to handle the bookkeeping. I can get you the VA’s information if you want to find out how much it costs.”

A person who has gotten a couple of articles published in online magazines or e-mail newsletters mentions he or she wants to write more articles for marketing. Someone says, “There’s an entire program for using articles for marketing your business. My friend is almost finished with a twelve-week course and is getting some great results. I’ll get you the name of the program.” The action-halting message in these sorts of responses may not be intentional, but it’s powerful: You can’t do that on your own.

The more helpful responses are straightforward and simple. They are responses using coaching skills. For example, when someone mentions getting two articles published and wants to do more, the coaching question might be as simple as, “When can you have your next article finished?” The coaching question to the person trying to decide if it’s time to get an autoresponder and start e-mailing clients might be, “What do you want this to do for your business?” The guy who got in the middle of re-arranging his home office and got overwhelmed by the piles and stacks of clutter might be asked, “What will it take for you to get all of it put away?”

That’s the “Duh!” moment. It’s a powerfully simple question, but most people don’t ask powerfully simple questions. This was my experience last week, while doing a homework exercise with a colleague in advanced coaching skills class. I would look at the mess in my re-arranged office, get stuck on where to start, and then put it out of my mind. So it stayed cluttered for days. That made it a great situation to use in our homework. That question changed the situation from overwhelming to annoying but doable.

The next question, just as simple, was even more powerful. “What’s the first step?” The bookcases are cluttered, tops of furniture are stacked with papers and books, and the closet is disorganized. It’s where I kept getting stuck. To clear off one area I need to put things away in another area, which is also a mess, but can’t be cleared until a different area is organized. Before, I would quit after about three rounds. With the focused question, I found the one section of the room where I can start. And I divided the job into eight unique tasks and posted them by my desk. Now I can tackle the tasks one at a time, once a day or every other day or even once a week.

The coaching question doesn’t pile up story after story with no helpful information. It focuses on the key part of my own story I need to change. The coaching question doesn’t give me someone else’s idea or opinion. It energizes my own. The coaching question doesn’t care what other people have heard is important in the situation. It asks what is important to me. The coaching question doesn’t defer to experts and warn that I can’t take steps without their guidance. It empowers me to do what I need to do in the way that is right for me.

The coaching question is often so easy to answer it seems simplistic, but when I answer it I have such certainty I sometimes get distracted wondering why I didn’t figure it out on my own. It’s because the answer is stuffed away in all the clutter of other people’s stories, advice, and expert opinions. The coaching question helps me dig through all that immediately so I can see the answer.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Playing It Too Safe

The Suburban I own is eight years old. It has over 135,000 miles on it. In 2005, when it had about 110,000 miles on it, we drove it from Texas to Minnesota and back for a soccer tournament. After that, I got concerned about reliability and gas prices. Instead of upgrading to a new Suburban, we bought a Honda Accord and kept the old Suburban. Last December I took the Suburban in for a thorough “check-up” and decided it was sound enough for a road trip to Orlando and back. It did great. At the end of June we had a road trip to the beach and then back to San Antonio to drop my son at soccer camp. I took the Suburban, and it did great, especially driving on the sandy beach.

So why did I decide to drive the Accord when my younger son and I went back to San Antonio to pick up my older son? I’ve put nearly 30,000 miles a year on the Accord, but it’s only three years old. I get the oil changed regularly and have all the necessary services done. I even had the tires rotated and balanced and serviced the air conditioner a couple of weeks before the road trip. I thought taking the Suburban on another road trip might be risky. I thought taking the Accord was a safe bet. I was wrong.

Things were fine on the way down and while we drove around San Antonio. But about twenty miles into the trip on the way back, a minivan came rushing up beside me to honk and wave and tell me the front tire was pretty low. I pulled off at the next exit and looked for a gas station. As I pulled up to a light and spotted a Shell sign, we smelled a musty smell in the car and the air conditioner started blowing hot. The rear view mirror fogged up, too.

The tire was pretty close to flat, and when I put air in it the side started bulging in two different places. Being astute, I realized that was a problem. And up until that moment I would have sworn one of the reasons I chose an Accord over other options was that it had a full-size spare. Turns out it’s just one of those temporary donut tires, which means you can’t drive 260 miles to home on it. The local store from the national chain I use to purchase tires was closed on Saturdays in that town, and the other national chain had a three-hour wait. It seems they were slammed by all the people with flats and tire problems on the day after Independence Day. Sometimes synchronicity sucks.

Fortunately, a local shop was able to sell me a good-enough tire for the drive back. But they didn’t have access to a new condenser for my air conditioner. We drove home with the windows down, which let my sons experience my version of walking to school ten miles in the snow, uphill, both ways. My car in high school didn’t have air conditioning. In Texas, that only really matters six or eight months of the year.

This trip and its misadventures are still fresh on my mind, but part of what I hear the universe screaming at me is you can’t always play it safe, because safe is often out of our control. I made a cautious choice and gave up comfort and space and luxury to keep from worrying about possible problems with the Suburban. I wound up with two annoying setbacks that were nothing but random chance.

I’m not reckless and I never have been. I’m overly cautious in a lot of ways, and I over-think and over-analyze some situations. But there’s safe, and then there’s an unfounded façade of safe. I made my choice of vehicle for the trip partly based on worry, seeking more certainty. But that’s now what I got.

If I had had a flat tire in the Suburban I would have driven home on the full-size spare with just a few minutes delay. A replacement part for the air conditioner would have been easy to find, because it’s an older American vehicle. I forgot about the flip side of trying hard to avoid problems – the fact that you need to plan to handle them, because they’re definitely going to come.

Things turned out pretty well, considering the tire could have blown. A blowout on the highway would have been dangerous. I was able to drive easily to a gas station, change to the donut spare, and get to a repair shop pretty quickly. Avoiding problems is good when you can do it, but handling the problems once they happen is more important in the long run.

For me this reinforces the “ready, fire, aim,” approach to business, which isn’t reckless, but is willing to take calculated risks, fail quickly falling forward, learn and improve, and get going again. I realized I sit on the fence for too long with some decisions where there is no perfect, or significantly better, choice. I need to choose with an awareness of the possible challenges and pitfalls of whichever path I take and be ready to handle them.

I keep “learning” this in my head, but I don’t consistently live it in my actions. It’s a great reminder at a time when I’ve been feeling stuck in the middle of some of those decisions without any perfect or clearly better options.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Mid-Year Review For The Daily Meeting System

It’s the end of the month. It’s the end of the quarter. And it also happens to be halfway through the year. The calendar is practically screaming at me that it’s time to review my progress on this year’s goals and adjust them if I need to.

I introduced the idea of the Daily Meeting System in an article called “This Sounds Nuts! But I Think You’ll Like It” in the Chasing Wisdom Blog-Zine. I’ve been using the system since then to move towards my goals. I’ve also been using it to see how it works and find ways to improve it.

Some of the things I’ve learned have been kind of funny. I’ve written steps on my weekly sheet that I had to move to the following week because I didn’t do them. At the end of the second week I’ve gotten frustrated with myself for not doing them still. But when I backed up and thought about it, I realized they weren’t helpful and they weren’t interesting. I was pretty smart not to do them, but I was too dumb to realize it!

For example, I had a step that said something like “Sketch guidelines for time-limited groups that combine training and coaching.” I still haven’t done it. I’ve thought about it and changed my mind a few times but never really got much on paper. I realized I’m not likely to come up with the guidelines, such as length of individual calls and number of people in the group and how much written material to use, until I’m actually planning a group. Having groups is on my list for down the road. Of course it would be helpful if I had it all planned once I get ready to run a group, but really, I won’t know what I need to include until I’m getting ready for the group. So it was a silly step that I finally set aside.

Mid-year is a great time to look at your annual goals to see how they’re doing. Notice I didn’t say to see how you’re doing. Look at the goals first. Were they reasonable? Were they in order? Have they been moving you towards your long-term vision? You’re halfway through this leg of your journey. It’s a great time to assess your progress and decide which route you’ll enjoy for the rest of the way.

I have a long-term goal of having ten to twelve coaching clients, but I’ve kept my number of clients very low while I work on other things. I adjusted my annual goal for clients recently after I decided I’m only ready to add up to three new clients, one every couple of weeks at the most. It will probably be a year or so before I’m ready for the higher number. Adjusting the number meant I have adjusted the steps I plan for getting the word out about my coaching practice. It’s been much more low-key and at a slower pace.

I realized in the past month that I want to focus a lot of my time on writing information products, and I want to include some creative writing in my schedule every day if possible. That time is available to me because I’m not spending a lot of time redesigning and developing web sites. Looking at the order of projects and stages, it became obvious I won’t have clear direction for changing my web sites until I have finished writing some information products and maybe developed a recorded product.

Reviews like this are obviously a great opportunity for self-criticism and despair, but I’ve learned some things to keep me from falling down that hill. I look at the unfinished steps and the avoided goals and wonder, What can I learn from this?

Sometimes I learn that I expected something to be enjoyable and it just wasn’t. Sometimes I learn that when I brainstormed things I needed to do I included some “shoulds” that weren’t really necessary. And sometimes I learn there are things I have to do for now, until I make enough money to pay someone else to do them, that are important even though they’re boring.

Those are just about the only things on my list of unfinished steps that I wind up keeping. The things that turned out to be less enjoyable and the things that turned out to be unnecessary get tossed aside. Then I have a fairly short list of things I have to do that I would prefer not to.

If you haven’t put any goals down on paper or on a mind map or a project board, it’s a perfect time to start. You can plan projects, or at least stages of projects, for the rest of summer (it just started) and for the fall. You can even decide to take a break from Thanksgiving until after the New Year. That leaves plenty of time to make progress. And trust me, even finding out the goals you set aren’t really goals you want, or are for the distant future and not for this year, is enormous progress.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

…And The Livin’ Is Easy

Maybe it’s the heat, which showed up at least three weeks before summer officially arrived. Maybe it’s the culmination of conversations with other people training to be coaches and online forum chats with other people trying to make a creative career change. Maybe it’s writing down the story of my very expensive and foolish misadventures pursuing different “business opportunities” in the past. Something has sapped the urgency and pressure from my schedule for building my business.

It could be something as simple as the fact we’re adding some vacation days to the front end and back end of a trip to drive my older son to soccer camp. There’s nothing like the thought of vacation to send motivation running!

I know times like these come during any large project. There is an ebb and flow to focus and motivation. The accountability and focus of a coaching group (I’m in one) or accountability buddies (I have those in the creative career forum if I just ask) usually help people stay on track, even when it feels like slow plodding through mud. But we’re all being affected in a similar way and not accomplishing much.

I’ve decided just to give in. I’m planning to go with the flow. I’ll kick back and take it easy. Just as soon as it gets easy.

So far, summer has been busy. We had soccer camp and then a soccer tournament. We’re getting a new bed and mattress for the master bedroom so the old ones are going into the guest bedroom/home office. That means it’s in the middle of being rearranged and looks like a storage shed. This all started when I thought about how to rearrange the guest bedroom and talked with my wife about having a real bed for guests should we ever have any. That became the push we needed to go ahead and get the new larger bed for our bedroom and move our old bed into the guest bedroom. In coaching we call things like this “forwarding the action!”

The new bed comes tomorrow so I’ll be moving one and setting the other up. Wednesday the technician comes to fix the phone line on the wall where I relocated the desk in my home office. Thursday we leave for a couple of days of fun before dropping my older son at a university soccer camp for the week.

I thought I had been sweating a lot because of the heat. I’m realizing it’s a combination of rushing around and worrying about getting everything done!

I’ve decided to accept additional coaching clients. I believe I can handle up to three more if I add them slowly. I’ll start contacting my friends and colleagues to let them know later this week and the week I get back from the first trip. I look forward to having some more clients, but I won’t mind if I don’t get any more until August. That will be after the trip to soccer camp, and the trip back to pick up my son from soccer camp, and then our long road trip to North Carolina for – you guessed it – another soccer tournament.

The old laptop’s going with me on all the trips. I’ll be working on my book for people who are deciding if self-employment and entrepreneurship are right for them. With all these other things going on, I’m keeping my work schedule this summer narrowed down to coaching, writing the book, and writing my weekly articles. There’s nothing like the stress of a crowded schedule to bring clarity and purpose to work!

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Getting More Portable

This past week my younger son had a soccer camp every morning and it was about a half hour drive from our home. I packed up my zippered binder, laptop, and three-ring notebook each day to be able to use some of the camp time for work.

What I didn’t discover was consistently good coffee nearby. I don’t enjoy coffee first thing in the morning and usually have a couple of cups mid-morning during my work. I can’t brew it in my car –yet – so I tried three different places during the week with mediocre results. What I did discover is which parts of my work routine I can pack up and take with me.

My daily planner is in my zippered binder with my monthly targets and weekly steps, so I was able to plan my day while eating breakfast and drinking mediocre coffee. Anything that was planning or list-making, like choosing groups of people to contact as part of my referral seeking program, could be done in the binder. Reading for professional development was obviously portable, also.

I took my laptop along and was able to write drafts of articles and spend time doing creative writing. When the places with coffee were too crowded and noisy for me to write, I learned it was easiest to sit in the back seat of my car, windows down, with a little bit of shade. This worked as long as I had a nice breeze because it’s getting darned hot in north Texas.

I started looking mid-week for places with Wi-Fi to see how it would work to access my web site and autoresponder control panels. I didn’t find anywhere with free Wi-Fi so I didn’t try it out. I left my e-mail time and web site and blog management for the afternoons when I was back in my office. With a little more information and experience I’ll be able to find internet access while I’m out, and with a little bit of effort I’ll be able to learn how to access my business e-mail through the web. Then I’ll be ready to turn any mediocre coffee joint with a shaded parking lot into my office.

This is a boost for me because I was talking about what I want and need in my home office with a coaching colleague this week. We are taking an advanced coaching skills class and were doing some practice to apply the skills when I looked around and realized my home office just happened by default nearly five years ago and I haven’t improved it since. As we talked and she practiced coaching skills, I realized I don’t need an office as much as I need comfortable space and user-friendly materials and equipment. I can write on the computer wherever I can set up my laptop. I can write in a three-ring notebook wherever I can find quiet space and not too much wind. I can brainstorm and arrange ideas wherever I can spread out a few sheets of paper. I can talk to coaching clients wherever I have a good phone connection and no distractions.

Realizing I don’t have to be in my office to work, and that I can plan to work in different areas of my home or at a park or a coffee joint even when my office is available to me, freed me up to design the office I need. I’ve made the cluttered guest-bedroom-turned-home-office into a chaotic mix of boxes, papers, equipment, and frequently moved pieces of furniture. It’s a total mess, especially since I have to wait almost two weeks until the technician can come and hook up the recently disconnected phone line opposite of where I have the phone and fax now. But when that’s set I’ll have a corner of the room for the computer, resources, and bookkeeping, plus a filing cabinet for paperwork. The rest of the room will become a comfortable guest room for when we need that, and I’ll use it as an office for only a few tasks. For me, having much of my work be portable is liberating.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Ruts With Ornate Wood and Polished Brass Handrails

We got back from the desert Wednesday and I spent the next four days thinking about Spongebob. My kids love the show so I’ve seen a few episodes. From time to time the little guy starts shriveling up because he’s out of the water. That’s how my brain felt. I think it was the slowest to dry out and the last to rehydrate.

My slowly drying brain may be part of the reason I felt so out of it when I thought about my business during the trip. Another reason was the setting. We were in Scottsdale most of the time, staying in a resort hotel. It’s hard to relate to authenticity and people striving to improve themselves mentally, interpersonally, and spiritually in that setting. I realized my drive for authenticity and self-expression was nearly drowned out by the power of the communal rut – of affluence.

Driving past the Mercedes dealership, then the Jaguar dealership, then the BMW dealership and the Range Rover dealership, it’s easy to develop the mistaken belief that fine living is a motivation for people to become solo entrepreneurs. In reality, many of the people enjoying that affluent lifestyle have high-paying jobs and spend a lot of time worrying about keeping them so they can protect their income.

On another level, affluent living not only pushes people to live in ruts to pursue and keep high-paying jobs, it also dictates the rut for enjoying the affluence. The stores, the restaurants, and the resorts all tell us This is how affluent people enjoy their money. Fit in by liking golf, spas, high-end shopping, expensive restaurants, and deserts artificially turned into tropical oases. It’s what all the “cool kids” are doing! Then fit in by getting into the high-paying job rut, and fight like crazy to stay there because it’s tough competition.

This rut thing gets even worse. Over Sunday dinner with my wife’s family we were talking about a news report that Joanna Rowling, Harry Potter creator and billionairess, gave a commencement address at Harvard and there were protests. It seems the ivory tower snobs consider her a second-rate talent and would have preferred someone more literary.

Joanna Rowling is one of my heroes. She had a story to tell and she committed herself to writing it and getting it published. It is, by most accounts, the best-selling book series of all time. At a time when people were giving up on getting kids to read, thinking we had to “dumb down” books and shorten them, kids started reading novels again. As new books came out, longer than before, the kids kept up. Some learned the joy of marathon reading, staying up for hours reading through hundreds of pages.

What a failure! That poor woman will never make it.

I doubt Jo Rowling set out to be a huge financial success with her writing. She probably dreamed of making a million dollars, but could she have conceived of making a billion? She followed her calling and expressed her gifts and talents. She did what she was born to do, and people appreciated it so she was rewarded.

Some trailblazers are making a living, just getting by, but having a great time being rewarded in many other ways. Some have surprising episodes where they make a lot of money and then see the lean times. Some slowly learn more about generating money and increase their pay over time. And some have spectacular financial success and enjoy it so much they do it over and over.

The key difference is the purpose. If they are chasing ways to make money, they are in a rut and they will stay in a rut. They will make money in a rut, they will spend it in a rut, they will be flashy in the rut, they will go into debt in the rut, and they will be afraid of leaving the rut to find themselves.

The trailblazers are discovering and expressing themselves. When they succeed, it’s out of the rut. They spend or save their money as they wish, and they don’t fear losing status and a rut lifestyle so they don’t have to hold back and give up their dreams. They’re free to pursue their dreams and create their own success, by whatever standard they want to measure it.

They know that a rut with beautifully accented handrails is still a rut, and they just won’t settle for that.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Updated 06/10/08 with the Rowling address video links:

It’s Hard To See The Ruts From The Twisting Road

Can you feel it? It hangs in the air, like the stuffiness of a closed-up room on a hot, humid day. It’s the pressure to compel graduating high school seniors into a college degree plan, and to compel college graduates into their nicely defined job-boxes.

Having “crossed over,” not only being self-employed but committed to work that helps other people have creative careers and be self-employed, I’m aware of this force all around me. Parents and family and friends of family emanate anxiety when they hear a graduate is still undecided, not sure of the next step. A high school graduate may not go to college right away in the fall. There are quiet gasps and scandalous looks. A college graduate may spend time pursuing more interests to find the right path before choosing a career. What will this do to the balance of nature? Will the earth’s magnetic poles shift, or will our planet wobble in its orbit around the sun?

That collective force acts as if personal freedom and creative choice will bring ominous results. But today’s articles in USA Today sound much more ominous.

“Slow times mean pay cuts for many” tells us bonuses, commission, and tips are falling. “Fuel prices drive some to try four-day workweeks” tells us that some businesses and government agencies are taking the drastic step of cutting back to four-day weeks. Scandal! How do we dare change a work pattern that is several decades old?

Traveling on the Twisting Road takes me above those ruts, so far above that sometimes I forget they are there. From the Road, it looks like you can work on a project at a reasonable pace and finish it, choosing a schedule based on when you are most productive. Up here I see that sometimes work requires a lot of focused hours, and sometimes it’s fewer, less intense hours of follow-up and coordination.

On the Road I bring my laptop when I’m out of town to be able to write the articles for my newsletter and publish them. I don’t spend time working on ongoing writing projects while I’m away, but I still spend a little time to keep up with my publishing schedule. I was even able to attend my advanced coaching class by teleconference today.

With so many of us changing our career focus to do something creative and meaningful in the middle of our lives, isn’t it inevitable that young adults will be more inclined to spend time finding authentic work before they settle into a job-box? It seems likely, and it seems right. At the point of greatest freedom and fewest obligations to hold them back, they can take a little time to find their gifts, talents, and passions and design work that expresses them and honors their values.

We’re in Phoenix for my niece’s high school graduation. I gave her the collection of books I recommended in a recent article in Chasing Wisdom. We also included a gift card, which she found right away, but as she looked through the gift bag she excitedly withdrew Barbara Winter’s Making A Living Without A Job. She was very excited and exclaimed, “Look, Dad! He knew!” They then joked about how she doesn’t want to have to work, but I’m still hopeful that it’s a wish not to be trapped in a boring job-box more than a wish to be able to amble through life with plenty of money and no deeper purpose or focus.

Up here On The Twisting Road we occasionally see people stuck in ruts and reach down to help them up. But many have lived in the ruts so long they can’t imagine there is safety, or provision, or even oxygen outside the rut. If we spread the message to young adults, before they get too settled in their ruts, maybe they’ll hop on the Road and choose blazing trails over wearing ruts into the same old paths.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Is This A Confession?

An authentic life includes authentic work. Authentic work helps you realize your dreams. It comes out of your gifts and talents and excites your passions.

That was an idea so radical but so obviously true that it grabbed me in a bear hug when I first read it expressed in one of Barbara Sher’s books. I’m hearing it expressed more often now, showing me the power behind the truth of the statement. The first step in finding authentic work is to reconnect with your gifts, talents, and passions, and dreams.

Which is why I can now proudly talk about my “guilty pleasure,” a popular reality show that helped point me to what resonates with my soul.

Don’t stop reading when I tell you it’s American Idol. My discovery of how parts of the show spoke to my core self is proof that you can get to your deepest interests by following wherever your interests lead you.

It wasn’t until the start of this year’s show, season seven, that I took the time to think about what the show taught me about myself. I first got drawn into the show when it started its second season. I was on a business trip in Florida and saw lots of signs about the show, focusing on Simon Cowell being a “monster.” Then I saw the television ads of his harsh comments, plus out-takes of auditions. The humor drew me in.

The format of each season’s earlier episodes is to show the audition process. The producers choose from a variety of comical, strange, interesting, and empathetic people and create short features to introduce them. That’s a joy for me because I love documentaries. The focused features on individual contestants are developed by editing real, unstaged or barely staged footage into a story with a particular viewpoint and emotional tone. That is the heart of documentary filmmaking.

The early episodes include excerpts of auditions of some of the more talented contestants interspersed with the outrageous ones. So while the humor and documentary storytelling draw me in, I start to notice potential waiting to be realized. That’s the big one for me. My passion is advocating personal growth and development, participating in the journey from discovering potential in its unpolished form to seeing it expressed in amazing accomplishments. When people face their fears and stretch their wings to find out what they are capable of doing, I celebrate. So by the time the outrageous auditions are over, I am invested in watching which people will commit to the work of challenging themselves to grow beyond their previous self-imposed limits.

That’s when the documentary quality of the show shifts. From that point on, the individual tales are about people struggling to rise out of poverty, adversity, and lives planned for them by boxes-and-ruts thinking.

It’s also the point where a distinction arises between people who have decent talent but are pursuing fame and wealth above anything else, and those with talent who find joy in developing and expressing it. The former have arrogant attitudes and shun the hard work, blaming others when they fall. The latter find a way to do the best with the challenges they are given. In a few amazing instances some transcend a challenge by finding a very personally expressive and unique way to present a song from their artistic perspective.

The show is cheesy – it’s contrived, inauthentic, and corny at times. The contestants have to perform songs from before they were born in small groups for auditions. They have to perform medleys of songs in musical review style as a group during each results show. Then they are criticized when their individual performances on competition night sound like a show on a cruise ship or at a theme park – a musical review. They are limited to a certain collection of songs by one artist or in one genre, and then they are criticized when they sound like the original. But they are also criticized if the performance is too unique, straying from the way the song was written.

But in the midst of all that unnecessary and inherently conflicted chatter, and the variety show quality of a lot of the “filler” segments, there are beautiful jewels. This year Brooke White sat at the piano and sang Let It Be, and then cried with obvious joy as Paula Abdul – yes, jokes aside, she is capable of amazing insight – put into words what Brooke was experiencing. She was doing what she was born to do, and what she had been planning and striving towards for years, by performing in front of a large live audience and millions watching by television. Paula said, “This is your dream. You’re living it right now.” Brooke melted.

Runner-up David Archuleta provided a few gems along the way, too. His performances of Imagine and Angels were amazing from a seventeen-year-old. His performance under the highest pressure, the night of the final competition, was pretty close to flawless. When he sang Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me I thought he had just given the performance that would make him the winner.

But winner David Cook was the best gem of the entire season. Early on in live competition, he took risks with his song choices, and he used different arrangements of songs in a way that let him express his own artistic style very clearly. Throughout the voting portion of the show, he was increasingly a strong artist, a compelling performer, and a singer who knew his voice well enough to rely on his strengths to express a song and connect with the audience. During the final night of competition he was a little rough and his voice a little raw, but he had already shown the courage of expressing himself as an artist, so people were eager to vote for him.

David Cook was a bartender working in Tulsa, Oklahoma when his brother asked him to accompany him to the auditions in Omaha. He did it to support his brother. During the initial screening round, the producers talked to him about auditioning. He said he hadn’t come to audition, but they talked him into it.

Every time he received critique from the judges, he made eye contact, he listened closely, and he responded with humility. When he was praised, he expressed gratitude. When he was criticized, he never argued or challenged. He displayed maturity and strong character. And each week he got better.

Now he’s going to be doing what he loves and sharing it with millions of people. What’s not to love about that?

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Getting To Be The Decider

This week my main work was to make some decisions. Just writing that it doesn’t sound like much. But these were decisions that I had been considering for quite a while, so they were the culmination of a lot of mental work.

First, I decided I will use the current format of sections for my Chasing Wisdom Blog-Zine through June. Starting in July I will change the format to be more focused on creativity, personal growth, and authentic living. In my framework of Why? What? How? it’s going to be focused on Why?

Why? is about purpose, the reasons we want to change and try a different path. What? is the change we decide to make or the new path we decide to follow. How? is the way we make it happen, the detailed steps we follow and pieces of information we gather to make our What become real so we can honor our Why.

On The Twisting Road, my e-mail newsletter (e-zine), will be focused more on What? and How? The articles and tips will be more practical and more action-oriented than Chasing Wisdom.

I have been posting articles to my Anything But Marketing! blog on a weekly basis. I realized I don’t intend to do that long-term. I usually post ideas based on conversations with fellow coaches and service professionals. I will post weekly when I can, but eventually I will compile the articles into a larger information product and pull down the blog. It’s a useful way for me to gather a variety of ideas for the future. I will include the ABM! posts in the newsletter whenever I have a new one.

On The Twisting Road will be published weekly on a regular basis, with occasional extra issues for special events or product announcements as I develop them. I have gone back and forth, and forth and back, trying to balance my preference for a focused newsletter with my preference for not publishing it so often it becomes annoying. I am on newsletter lists where I receive multiple issues in a week. Too often I find myself getting annoyed by multiple newsletter issues per week. I am most pleased with newsletters that arrive on a weekly or semi-weekly basis. As a result of my completely unscientific research of a non-representative sample – me – I chose to have a weekly publishing format.

I will publish Chasing Wisdom monthly. I have been posting a section per week, for a total of four sections per month. That was a way to have weekly content for my newsletter: There’s a new section of my Blog-Zine posted! Since the newsletter has its own content and will be targeted a little differently, I can write Chasing Wisdom over the course of the month and publish it in a day or two.

Another decision I made was the format for my new business cards. I’ve been planning the new ones since I started passing out the current ones. I have streamlined my card to web address, e-mail address, and phone number. It’s applicable to my business as a writer, trainer, information publisher, and coach… because it doesn’t mention any specific job! I’m looking forward to learning what it’s like to pass them out, and to finding out how they will be received.

I clarified my decision not to focus on parent coaching. I realized I am passionate about healthy child development, especially psychological development, but not passionate about parents’ struggles. I think I will focus on training teachers and caregivers and coaching people who supervise them instead of coaching parents. I may offer parent training, if I find a market that will pay, but I will limit my coaching around promoting healthy child development to people who are also passionate about it and wanting to learn and grow in their abilities and understanding.

Whenever I take my sons to the bookstore, I’ve been reading Eckart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose (Oprah's Book Club, Selection 61). It’s somewhat scholarly so I’m taking my time with it. I try to follow along as he writes about “awareness” that brings people out of “unconsciousness” and helps to overcome the “ego.” To understand him I have to use a different system – Carl Jung’s personality theory, which is also complex and esoteric.

Tolle’s book gives me hope in this way: if he can have a successful career writing such cumbersome books about profound philosophical and spiritual ideas, and even train groups and provide individual counseling on them, I can probably have a successful coaching and training business that includes excursions into deeper purposes along with practical steps to improvement.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Purpose Is My Purpose

Somewhere in the past few days, I decided to write a new tag line for my business. The current version is:

Your Path To An Authentic Life Starts Here

The key idea that resonates with me is authentic living. Personal growth and development is about living authentically. It’s about uncovering your gifts, talents, and passions, and designing a life that incorporates and expresses them while honoring your values.

I realized this week, after writing an article for my Anything But Marketing! blog, that I keep coming back to “Why?” as the starting point for many things.

Why? To What End? What Is The Purpose?

These questions are central to me when designing my business, planning marketing, choosing a niche for coaching, and pretty much in most areas of my life. I haven’t read a complete Stephen Covey book yet – just chapters and excerpts – but I hear many people quote him when they say, “Begin with the end in mind.” It’s this focus on purpose, and the willingness to explore and question and clarify purpose, that compels me.

The purposes that interest me most are deeper. They are transcendent, they are creative, and they are spiritual. I think living authentically means honoring these deeper purposes. I think it means pursuing a connection with things that are eternal.

I am encouraged that Barbara Winter discusses the connection between spiritual purpose and small business success in her recorded discussion with Nick Williams called “Outsmarting Resistance.” Having focused her career on helping people find ways to be self-employed and start small businesses, she has been in a position to see many people pursue this path. She tells us the notion that you must either choose something meaningful and spiritually significant to do, or something profitable, is untrue. She and Nick have seen people become energized when they focus their businesses on things that are meaningful to them, and that energy has contributed to financial success.

Man, I hope that works out! If I have to choose between authentic work and making a lot of money, I don’t even think I can choose. I’m not sure I can sustain something for any period of time if it isn’t meaningful.

I really want this to be possible. I really want to find out that living authentically is the ultimate measure of success, and that it leads to financial success.

I’m sure that it’s true for many people. I’m nearly sure it’s true for everyone. I’m going to commit myself to making it true for me.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Finding Fuel For The Journey

This morning I came across this quote in the Early To Rise e-mail newsletter:

“Envy comes from people's ignorance of, or lack of belief in, their own gifts”
~ Jean Vanier

Scroll down to “The Most Stupid of Vices” by Alexander Green and read his take on envy.

I have printed the quote and taped it to the side of my printer right next to my computer. I am not drawn to it so much for its focus on the folly of envy, but the emphasis on each person’s ability to have the life we think is restricted to only a select few, when we rely on ourselves.

The road to creative solo entrepreneurship is about finding our unique gifts, talents, passions, and values and designing work that aligns with them. But more than that it is about finding the strength and ability to do things we never thought we could, or would have to.

Earlier this week my younger son was saying he wished that we would find a pirate ship filled with sunken treasure, or win a jackpot, so we could be rich. I asked what he would do with the money. He said he would build a huge house with a video game room and a movie room. I tried to point out the extra work and extra expense of a huge house, but he wasn’t really paying attention. The best I could come up with was to give him a blessing.

I told him that, rather than have a lot of money to buy things that would bore him quickly, my wish and hope for him is that he learn how to find work that he loves and start his own business so he can take charge of his future. That way he will have the power in himself to generate money when he wants something. He won’t have to sit around waiting for an unlikely act of fate. Instead, it will be up to him, and that will be much more enjoyable and rewarding.

He got a little down, saying he had no idea what kind of business a nine-year-old could start. As we talked about it he thought maybe he could design things out of LEGOs and sell them. The idea was laid aside and he hasn’t brought it back up, but I’m glad he’s beginning to think about this at nine.

The conversation with my son happened earlier this week. The quote from Vanier showed up in my world today. They point to the same place. When we don’t see our own gifts and our own power, we resent and envy others and blame them for holding us back. When we look at what we want and think, How am I going to do that? we feel abundant, capable, and generous.

There is a next level to this thought, but it’s a little more vague. Some people who want to change their lives, especially related to work, say they want to be self-employed but seem to be waiting for someone else to design them a j-o-b and hand it to them. I think part of that comes from the mentality of not seeing our own gifts and our own power. Some, however, won’t take the steps for other reasons.

I think a lot of people see the effort and work involved in starting even a part-time small business and get overwhelmed. They see it as a drain on resources. The best analogies I can come up with are driving a gas-guzzling car with high gas prices, or camping for a few days away from civilization. You wind up thinking and planning from the point of limitation and scarcity. You think, If I do that, will I have the gas to go do this? or maybe, If I use up all my water on this hike, I’ll just barely have enough to get by until the day I leave.

If you do something that is aligned with your gifts, talents, and passions, energy will flow into you. It will be emotional and spiritual energy. Sure, you’ll still get physically tired if there are physical things to do, but you won’t wind up drained. If you spend a lot of time and effort on something that doesn’t connect with your soul, your emotional and spiritual energy can get tapped out pretty quickly.

I think this is the point of view that keeps a lot of people from trying something out. They think it has to be the exact right thing before they put in the time and energy because they’ve only got this one shot. They don’t realize that working towards an authentic life will restore them and recharge them.

I also think, based on this powerful quote, that they don’t realize how much they can actually do. They don’t see that, if something is important in a way that touches their core, they will find the way to make it happen. They don’t realize they have enormous reserves when it comes to resources for deciding, acting, and making things happen.

Obviously, part of “they” is “me.” I feel a lot of resistance with some ideas, thinking I might wind up putting in too much time and effort only to see it flop, or only to find out I don’t really want to be doing that kind of work long-term. I come from the mindset that I have to get it right, or pretty close to right, because I will run out of gas if I go too long without quick results. I forget that trying out new things is pretty fun a lot of the time, and I forget that I won’t really know if some things are a good choice for me until I try them. To quote my nine-year-old son (in his optimistic version of the saying), “You can’t like it ‘til you try it.”

I’m still learning I don’t have to be sure I’ll be hugely successful at something in order to try it out. I’m re-learning that I’m going to struggle with things and be pretty crummy at a few while I’m learning them. But that’s the joy of mastery. If it’s easy at first, there’s no elation when you conquer it. If it’s a quick and open road, there’s no challenge.

I’ll leave the idea of the quick and open road to the “Make 6 Figures In 7 Days!” crowd. I prefer the reality of the struggle, because it’s the way of the journey, and the journey is the only reason to go anywhere.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

You Can Work From Anywhere In The World!

Does that idea of “working from anywhere in the world” grab your attention? It always gets mine. With the right kind of work, all you need is a laptop computer and a hot spot plus a cell phone. Maybe you only need access to a computer once in a while. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

I think that somebody needs to offer remedial classes on “How To Work From Anywhere In The World!” I’m not very good at it yet.

My sons and I are traveling to Cincinnati for a soccer tournament. The work I need to do while I’m gone is writing and posting articles and having one coaching session. Already I’m over my head!

When I planned to have my coaching call by cell phone, I forgot about the time change. I’ll be driving to a soccer field at the normally scheduled time, so I had to reschedule the session. My wonderful client was understanding so we changed the session to a different day. But come on! How hard should it be to plan one coaching session?

I have a laptop that’s eight or nine years old and I want to bring it along. But I realized that many of my login sites and passwords are automatically stored in my desktop computer so I might not be able to send out my newsletter or work on my blog-zine.

So I’m writing this during a break in packing early Thursday afternoon. We fly out this evening. I know! What was I thinking?

For all of you struggling with time management problems, take heart. We usually manage the day-to-day stuff because we get into habits and a rhythm. It’s the occasional big event with hard-to-predict time requirements that throws us.

It’s okay, though, because I’m learning. I’m learning that “work from anywhere in the world” is a great marketing argument but a big challenge to pull off. I’m learning that, while it’s fun and exciting to take care of all the little details when your business is small and starting to grow, it can leave you jammed when other things come up. I’m guessing the “work from anywhere in the world” crowd have some excellent employees or virtual assistants keeping things running smoothly behind the scenes while they’re hopping the globe.

Some day I’ll be very good at this. I’ll have everything I need on a new, fast laptop. I’ll have figured out what I need by going places, doing some work while I’m there, and learning each time. If I need to publish something while I’m gone, I’ll know when, where, and how I can do it. If there are things that need to get done that I can’t manage while out of town, I’ll have a virtual assistant to handle them for me.

But this weekend I’m hopping on a plane with my old laptop so I can test run this idea. If I get to work on upcoming articles, I’ll come back to a comfortable schedule. If not, boy am I gonna’ be rushed!

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey