Twisting Road Travel Log

The Travel Log's New Home

2008-10-20T14:53:00.000-07:00

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

Packing Up And Moving

2008-10-13T21:37:00.000-07:00

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

2008-10-06T20:47:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-29T15:47:00.000-07:00

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.

My allegorical scenic turnout was the pause I took today after the final class of my intensive coaching skills course. In our final class we coached each other in short, quick sessions and discovered we had developed more confidence and clarity as coaches. Each class member then spoke to classmates and our instructor about the way they have touched our lives and improved us as people.

I have been looking forward to the end of this course as a milestone in my coaching career. During the many months of basic coaching training, I found where my knowledge and personal traits help me as a coach and where I needed more information and experience. I studied and practiced the skills until I was able to coach competently. The intensive skills class challenged me to improve rapidly. As it ends, I know I am a much stronger coach who can help people change their lives dramatically.

One of the last classes we had was on the skill of celebration. We learned specific ways to focus clients on their accomplishments and help them appreciate their own effort overcoming obstacles. All of us tend to look at the to-do list and get frustrated with ourselves for all we haven’t gotten done. Celebration has us look at the all-done list, or the “ta-da!” list, to see the value in our progress.

I thanked my classmates today for their willingness to try things that felt awkward or uncomfortable at times as we practiced skills together. I also thanked them for their kindness and gentleness with me so that I felt safe trying new things and taking risks. We have to take risks to stretch ourselves. That’s tough to do if mistakes are criticized. It’s much easier when grace is extended and mistakes are just steps on the road to mastery.

I especially thanked our instructor, Anne Durand. I have heard several coaching demonstrations and read coaching transcripts. I understood coaching pretty well through these examples and was able to see in general where I was headed as a novice coach. Anne’s coaching was above anything I had heard or read before. She manages the skills of coaching with elegance and ease. Her heart and her intuition are fully engaged and she creates a very safe space for people to explore and challenge themselves. She is the beacon on a hill, the standard to which I will aspire in my coaching career.

You can learn more about the field of professional coaching at the MentorCoach website. The basic coaching class is called Foundations and will prepare you to begin your own coaching business. MentorCoach has its own certification program recognized by the International Coach Federation (ICF). Courses taken through MentorCoach count toward ICF certification if you take courses from a variety of programs.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Reprieve From The Muck

2008-09-22T11:52:00.000-07:00

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.

It’s kind of like being in high school or college and dreading a particular class. You knew you would have to take it and everyone complained about it, like government or economics or statistics. One semester you got your schedule, sure the class would be on it, and found out you had a reprieve because it just wouldn’t fit in. You were thrilled. But then you came back down to earth and remembered you were going to have to take that class some time, so you had just delayed the misery.

So the exercises that ask me to think back to my childhood or adolescence or young adulthood and remember what mattered to me are looming in my future. The one that asks me to imagine what I would do if I didn’t have to worry about money will show up in the next three months, causing me to question my entire purpose and core beliefs. Instead of avoiding them until they are back on the schedule, I’m going to spend a little time each week with the ideas they stir up.

Considering the exercises last week opened up a lot of windows in my not-quite-conscious mind. They stirred up some memories and energized some values that I have but was taking for granted. I’m still in the middle of the process of uncovering and sorting things out. It’s disconnected and still a little confusing.

I think I’m getting back into the tension between coaching and counseling again. My former career as a therapist has been showing up in twilight dreams, the ones I have as I’m just starting to fall asleep. It also resurfaced when two different people contacted me to ask questions about possible psychological disorders in a friend or family member. It required me to use some skills and stored facts that were getting dusty sitting in the back of my mind. And the path pointed me back to my graduate school professors as people with answers to some specific and unique questions. This is pushing me to reclaim my past vision and integrate it more fully into my new vision instead of treating it as something set aside.

I have also had a couple of deep sleep dreams lately where I wind up owning a child care center again. The dreams have a strange sense of obligation, where either because of the expertise my mother and I have or because of other people’s struggles running a center we are drawn back in. It’s a “reluctant hero” archetype in many ways. But the feelings I have in the dreams are resignation and apprehension. Going back feels like being stuck when I’m in the dream. When I’m awake and considering the dream, I feel unresolved. When I left that career, I think I left something behind that I need to reclaim.

Together the dreams and more vibrant memories of my two past careers are telling me I’ve got to include them in the development of my new career. My approach has been to look at them as closed chapters, only willing to carry forward the bits that help point me to my calling. I’ve seen my past career choices as me getting sidetracked while trying to find my real calling.

But there’s more information than that in my past choices. If I were looking at me from the perspective of another person, I would recommend seeing the previous careers as different stages or manifestations of a calling, not near-misses. I hope I can eventually integrate my past careers more fully with my new one. The more I use all the aspects of my self in this work the more capable and comfortable I will be.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Mucky Times

2008-09-15T22:49:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-09-08T21:37:00.000-07:00

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

2008-09-01T21:01:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-08-25T14:51:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-08-18T22:28:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-11T14:23:00.000-07:00

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

2008-08-04T14:26:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-07-21T10:14:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-14T21:08:00.000-07:00

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

2008-07-07T22:33:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-30T21:45:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-23T21:39:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-16T21:36:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-09T19:54:00.000-07:00

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

2008-06-02T17:22:00.000-07:00

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?

2008-05-26T20:50:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-18T18:26:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-09T21:03:00.000-07:00

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

2008-05-02T20:28:00.000-07:00

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!

2008-04-24T12:36:00.000-07:00

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

Having Fun in the Web Design Sandbox

2008-04-18T12:59:00.000-07:00

Look out world! I am armed with pass codes and HTML!

For those of you whose eyes glaze over when talk turns to the internet, I offer a disclaimer. My big accomplishments this week are all web-related. But be heartened! One scenic turnout in the road led me to a good idea for technophobes.

First, biggest, happiest, and best accomplishment – I learned how to edit my SteveCoxsey.com web site! My web guy is actually a programming and database expert, so websites are a small profit center to him. I like to make little changes here and there, much faster than we could work out. He got brave, and I got brave, and he decided to show me some basics with Front Page last night. I can edit and reformat and change themes and colors and completely screw things up now!

My other accomplishments might seem small by comparison. It was such a little idea I just let it float around in the back of my head for a while before deciding to act. I got three new URLs. I redirected two of them to my blogs. My “Anything But Marketing!” blog on TypePad can now be accessed at AnythingButMarketing.com. This “Twisting Road Travel Log” on Blogger can be accessed at TwistingRoad.com.

Why does this matter? In part because it’s neater and a little cleaner. When I reference a blog the name is the URL. This looks nicer in my e-zine, which I send out in simple text format. That’s the use for my third new URL. I set up a basic free page at OnTheTwistingRoad.com for my e-zine. Eventually I’ll build a “squeeze page” that gives a better enticement for people to sign up. For now there’s something functional at that address.

What’s the point? I can focus on creating a free offer and design the squeeze page to give a free report or free audio or whatever I come up with to people who sign up. It’s another step to building my list, with many more to follow.

Other technical accomplishments weren’t as important. Unless you consider the lighting store adventure I wrote about in Wednesday’s edition of “Anything But Marketing!” Finding those halogen replacement bulbs was a huge accomplishment when you consider the effort it took!

I tweaked my DiscoveryLookout.com site so it is more consistent and flows better. Playing with the little bit of HTML code I’ve learned is fun and takes over my time.

Which brings me to the idea for technophobes. Coaching colleagues will talk about needing to set up a web site but having little knowledge, or they’ll talk about the price of hosting and having a web master design a site for them. Many don’t have a point of comparison and it seems like a lot of money to invest for a basic informational site. A few weeks back I talked about this to a friend who helps a couple of businesses maintain and update their sites. She got back in town this week and was able to give me some ideas yesterday.

She doesn’t have the expertise to design a web site from scratch, but she works very well with templates. She doesn’t know extensive HTML coding, but she knows enough to customize parts of templates and add things the business owners need. The technophobe-friendly idea is to purchase a templated site for a reasonable fee or buy template software. With the free help of a friend who knows a little HTML coding, or the affordable help of someone who is not a web master but can do web maintenance and updating, a technophobe can set up a site fairly quickly for just a little money.

The best part is that this approach lets you learn little steps and be comfortable gaining skills and mastery. The second best part is that it lets you have quick access to and control of your site, which you’re going to want. Trust me!

Technophobes of the world, take heart and move forward into the ominous world of web technology. Technophiles of the world, step up and guide us into the future! And teach us while you do it. And only give us as much as we need each time, and only charge us for the little bit we need!

You may now de-glaze your eyes.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

What Have I Learned This Week?

2008-04-11T18:55:00.000-07:00

I’ve gotten in the habit of writing what I’ve learned each week along my own journey as a solo entrepreneur. Sometimes I get a “big picture” view of things that helps me move forward. Sometimes I learn one small thing and another little piece falls into place. Sometimes I re-learn something I already figured out but then forgot. Okay, maybe it’s more than sometimes.

As I sit here thinking about what I learned this week, I can’t come up with anything about being a solo entrepreneur or about my business in particular. But I can come up with important things I haven’t learned!

On Wednesday night I had the great pleasure of facilitating a resource group conference call for students in training through MentorCoach. We struggled with many questions about the line between coaching and consulting or training. In its pure form, coaching helps a client find answers and does not present the coach as an expert on any subject. Providing information or suggestions crosses into consultation or training.

I know I enjoy brainstorming and am able to share specific information when I work with clients, and I don’t want to limit my way of helping to a small box. I want to use coaching skills but not be primarily a coach. What I didn’t learn is what to call that role and the kind of service I want to provide.

I want to find information on personal growth, especially around the idea of living authentically in a way that honors a person’s gifts and passions and values. I want to find exercises and techniques for helping people reconnect to creativity and go through self-discovery. What I didn’t learn is what format to use for sharing information in a way that works best with my own gifts, passions, and values.

I want to encourage creative career choices and help people find the way to work in unique ways that they love. I want to encourage people who can’t find a way to make a living doing what they love to make sure they find work that allows them to do what they love and keeps it at the center of their lives. What I didn’t learn is how to bring something fresh and new to the field, or how to present myself in order to do that.

I want to write on different topics. Most are related to personal discovery and personal growth and stretching oneself to take on new challenges. But I want to write on other topics, too. I want to travel sometimes to see a place and meet interesting people and tell their story. What I didn’t learn is how to do that in a way that leads to income.

That’s the biggest thing I didn’t learn this week. I didn’t learn all the steps to fill in between a free e-mail newsletter and a free blog-zine on one end and paid services on the other. That’s due in large part to the fact that I didn’t learn what it is I really want to be doing to earn money! I want to write, and I want to work directly with people, individually and in groups. But I didn’t learn what that’s going to look like.

So I end this week with lots of questions and not many answers. Which, oddly enough, is the beginning of an answer. I like the fact that coaching moves people forward and helps them accomplish goals. But I also want to work with people who have no easy answers, and need to marinate in their questions for a while, because the discovery is slow and may run very deep.

I wonder what that’s going to look like!

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

How Safe Is A Rut?

2008-04-04T10:57:00.000-07:00

A few years back we lived in a different city, another nearby suburb in the area between Dallas and Fort Worth. When we moved into our little (actually tiny) house, we were surrounded by open fields. Our house and the neighbors’ house were the only ones there – former model homes in a development that was stalled for years because of a court case over ownership of the land.

Over time, the Farm to Market road that passed by old farmhouses and lots of open land was widened to two lanes plus a turn lane. Traffic lights went in, and so did convenience stores, strip malls, and housing additions. The other Farm to Market road that intersected it a few miles north, the one that took me to the lake by passing through a couple of old country towns, eventually got widened, too. Now it’s the main street of an upscale suburb with Starbucks, a gourmet grocery store, and a huge shopping, dining, and entertainment center. The drive from the old house to the lake used to take less then twenty minutes. That same drive would be almost twice as long now, with all the traffic and those darned traffic lights.

Since we didn’t move far, I still drive in the area close to the old house, sometimes several times per week. A friend was talking to me the other day about a new strip mall in that area and said it was just down from the new funeral home. I was totally confused and couldn’t figure out where she was describing because there were no funeral homes in the area. She told me the intersection again, so the next time I went that way I looked closely. There was a new funeral home, next to the new architect’s office, down from the new church.

This reminded me of a day when we had lived in our old house for a few years when an elderly lady at the corner gas station was completely lost. She was explaining she was looking for the old main street that had the feed store on it. The feed store had moved into a big new building on the Farm to Market road and the old building was being renovated. With all the new construction in the area she couldn’t find her familiar landmarks. She didn’t get out to drive very often, but it was a month or less since she last drove and things had changed that quickly. I let her follow me up the road about a quarter of a mile, and then I turned to drive her by the old feed store. From there she said she would be fine.

Things change around us constantly, even if we want to live in a rut. Sometimes people choose ruts because they’re predictable and comfortable. But the rut you start following today will not be the rut you follow in ten years, even if you try. The business I co-owned was very different the day we sold it compared to the day I joined it. The year I spent returning to a therapy practice after selling the business was a distant experience to the seven years I spent as a therapist before the business.

Last summer while on a road trip I took a slight detour to show my sons the house my family lived in for many years of my childhood. The rural area outside the small town now has a car dealership on one corner and small shops and offices on the road to it. There were so many new houses I drove by my old house and had to turn around to find it. Once again, I felt like that elderly lady, in a familiar place but with so much new information the familiar was hidden.

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to me to pursue a creative career and be a solo entrepreneur. It doesn’t mean safety or predictability. It doesn’t mean the comfort of the known. It means adventure, and challenges, and the freedom to fall. It means I step into new territory every day, even if it’s just figuring out how to position something on my web page by learning one piece of HTML code. It means I can look at people who are successful at similar things and learn from them, but I don’t just follow their path. I figure out where those skills and accomplishments will be important on the trail I’m blazing for myself.

Life’s going to change around me whether I want it to or not. If I don’t keep up it’s going to leave me behind. I’d rather be out there exploring and learning and trying new things. This way I’ll be more comfortable with changes and can take them in stride. And I’ll be in charge of more of the changes, making them happen to improve my life.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Is This Blog My New Weekly E-zine?

2008-03-28T14:27:00.000-07:00

This week on Tuesday and Thursday I was listening to Alexandria Brown’s last free teleseminar on e-zines. It was kind of a big deal, because she’s the E-zine Queen.

The Tuesday night call was a free course on latest methods and techniques for getting the best results from an e-mail newsletter, or e-zine (electronic magazine). Thursday night there were five or six people (I left the call early so I’m not sure) who use Ali’s ideas and were talking about their results.

The recordings of the calls are available through her blog, the first link above. The Tuesday call is worth downloading and listening to. Thursday’s was more testimonial but there were some specific ideas I heard for people wanting better results from an e-mail newsletter.

I was listening Tuesday night and not hearing much new at first, but suddenly I grabbed a notebook and started taking lots of notes. Ali was giving a lot of “how-tos” and “why-tos” and that sort of thing – specific, useful information.

Then she told us one of the biggest mistakes people make when they decide to start an e-zine is to try to put too much content into each issue. It becomes such a big task they can only publish monthly. She said that’s a bad idea.

Ouch!

My goal has been to publish monthly issues of Chasing Wisdom. I wanted to have several sections and lots of content. Ali recommended taking that much content and breaking it down into one idea per week. That reminded me I initially planned to post one section per week until a month’s issue was fully posted. I haven’t followed that plan, focusing more on getting a month’s issue posted on time.

She was also talking about ways to get more people to opt-in to the e-mail list to get the e-zine. Now there’s where my plan seems to have a huge hole. You don’t have to sign up for my newsletter to get my information. The articles are posted on the web. My newsletter just basically says, “Hey, everybody! My articles are posted!”

On Wednesday I got The Wednesday Minute, which is actually several minutes these days. Alex Mandossian was talking about how he uses a “squeeze page” to get people to give their e-mail address when they navigate to his blog page. It’s a somewhat clever idea, though I’m not sure of the value of an e-mail address given in this way.

But these things got me thinking. (Yikes!) First, I need a weekly e-mail newsletter. Second, I like writing articles for Chasing Wisdom. Third, I don’t think a newsletter that goes out weekly to say, “Hey, another section of my blog-zine is posted” will be very valuable to my business long-term.

I haven’t figured this all out yet. However, I realized that I post here weekly, and I post to my Anything But Marketing! blog weekly. I chart my own journey here, so it’s a record of my discoveries, challenges, struggles, and successes transitioning to a new career. Since I want to work with people discovering and transitioning to creative careers, this information could be useful. The ideas for “telling your story” in Anything But Marketing! are simple and practical. Sounds like an e-mail newsletter to me!

I’m trying to figure out how to integrate or re-arrange or Frankenstein what I’m already doing into a weekly or twice-weekly e-mail newsletter. I really like the idea of having past issues archived on the web, so maybe I’ll post things to my newsletter and then a week or so later archive them. The advantage to signing up would be getting the information earlier.

I might consolidate my blogs to one site by making them sub-pages of a designated site. Haven’t figured that out yet. Obviously, if and when I do make that kind of change, I’ll put it in my newsletter and post it here!

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Stages of Creative Career Change: Did I Get It Right?

2008-03-21T14:26:00.000-07:00

For the past couple of weeks I’ve been brainstorming ways to help some friends in the Fast Track Your Dream program move more quickly through the process of discovering their calling and transitioning to a new career. It led me to put together information from different fields – marketing and psychology – to think about the stages of creative career change.

I sketched out my ideas then filled in some details. Then I went back and refined things to make them clearer. I wound up with a pretty good framework for understanding the process in general steps and knowing what people might need at each step.

The stages I came up with go from (1) dissatisfaction with work but not interested in finding a calling, to (2) wondering if work can be meaningful, to (3) beginning to investigate creative alternatives to a job-in-a-box, to (4) getting clear about the idea of a calling and seeing how to make it into a career, to (5) developing a plan to start a creative career, to (6) implementing the plan, then to (7) mastery of the new career.

So of course I took a look at my own career transition to see where I am.

Great news! As of last week I’ve started the move from Plan Development to Plan Implementation. I know, I know, I’ve been implementing along the way. In my framework people are gathering information and learning things while they develop their plan. I was learning by trying things out, and I kept getting away from the focus of getting a clear plan. Good thing I didn’t have me as a client. I would have driven me nuts!

Next for me come the stages where I get competent at the basics, then over time master my career. Fortunately I get to add new plans and pieces to my business along the way so I will have variety and new challenges, and I’ll go through many of the stages for each new component.

This framework of stages lets me think in terms of helping other people focus their questions, their research, and their effort. It gives them a way to figure out where they are in the process and focus on the next steps instead of trying to do a lot of different steps that are probably out of order.

If anyone stumbles across this post and has comments, questions, or feedback on the process of finding your calling and designing your life around it, please post comments here or e-mail me. I would love to develop a program that incorporates all kinds of individual differences and possible challenges but still quickly pinpoints where to focus your time and effort.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Finally – A Niche!

2008-03-14T20:19:00.000-07:00

I write a blog about my transition to a career where I can use my gifts, talents, and passions, bring more enjoyment and fulfillment to my life, and be a solo entrepreneur – a solopreneur. That’s this blog, of course.

I write another blog about conversational and comfortable approaches to marketing a personal service business.

I deeply enjoy participating in a creative career change forum through Fast Track Your Dream.

I participate in a Parenting Coaches’ group and find the most energizing and interesting part to be when we discuss marketing and help members come up with ways to get their message to clients, or think about ways to tell more people about the Parenting Coaches’ group blog.

And still I was thinking that working with people who are trying to discover their calling to create work they love was just one of many areas I should be developing as I build my business.

When I named my business Discovery Lookout I followed Barbara Winter’s advice. I chose a name that will encompass related interests, all of them connected through the idea of mentorship on personal growth and development. But I got into the trap of thinking I should take everything that interests me about personal growth and development and pile it into my business right now.

I enjoy working with people who are dedicated to learning better ways to relate to children, but frankly I don’t know that coaching parents will express that. It seems hard to find people who are doing a good job but really want to become masterful as parents. Mostly people seek help in crisis situations so it’s more like therapy and parent consultation on behavior management techniques.
(Y-A-A-A-W-N-N-N) Right now I express those goals through my volunteer work.

I enjoy working with teachers and childcare professionals on better approaches to working with children. It will stay on my list, but it’s not a priority for now.

I get excited about working with people who want to become better leaders by encouraging and supporting the people they lead. I think mentorship is a wonderful model for that. That will be put off for me to develop in the future, probably as training and consultation.

I enjoy working with groups to foster a spirit of community, connection, and cooperation. I can develop training, guided exercises, and follow-up with brief coaching. But it’s not the right place for me to start.

All these things fit into the second tier of my mission. That second part is to spread a vision of mentorship so more people will invest their time and energy into the growth and development of others. My mission starts with me promoting growth and development through mentorship.

I’m starting my business where my mission starts. I will focus on helping people uncover their gifts, talents, and passions, rediscover their dreams, design a life plan that includes joyful and meaningful work, and transition to that life.

I’ll support people as they start small businesses and become solopreneurs, and I’ll help small business owners and solopreneurs move their businesses to the next level. Other stuff I can add later. I’m going to start where my passion is pulling me.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

This CEO’s A Taskmaster!

2008-03-07T20:10:00.000-08:00

Who wrote this in my blog last week???

Here’s the strange part. I’m not really doing more work, and I’m not doing things in much more of a focused way. I’m just more aware of the usefulness of what I’m doing at the time. That makes my effort seem more practical and more worthwhile.

I’m gonna’ have to edit myself! That’s hardly believable – and certainly not true!

This was my second week beta-testing the daily meeting system. One thing’s for sure. I’m definitely getting more things done.

In all fairness to me (I need to extend myself some grace sometimes) it’s true that I’m doing the same kinds of things and spending about the same amount of time doing them. But instead of brainstorming while driving then jotting down ideas and tossing the sheet into a folder with a dozen other sheets, I get productive. I pull out all the old brainstorm sheets for the category, summarize them into important concepts, and then have dedicated – planned in my schedule – time to come up with more ideas or extend and develop the ones I have.

Instead of planning to write a blog post or article when I have finished a group of tasks and think I’ll have an unplanned block of time, I actually plan the block of time for writing.

But it’s so efficient I did start planning in another thing here and a couple of things there. At the end of the day, when I have my review meeting, I’m mentally tired and ready to stop thinking.

I know I set myself up with that one. Soft pitch right over the plate.

The system is working. I get my personal errands done, the household to-dos, things for my kids, plus regular progress forward on my business.

I even learned on Thursday that, when a huge snowfall hits Texas in March and my kids get out of school early, I can improvise with my schedule and enjoy playing in the snow for a while and take care of my list later. Since I knew exactly what I wanted to accomplish that day that still wasn’t done, it was easy for me to see how to reschedule and choose a couple of small things to bump until Friday or the next week.

I hope you’re making steps forward in finding and starting a career that speaks to your gifts, passions, talents, and values. Let me know how it’s going.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Getting’ Real

2008-02-29T14:10:00.000-08:00

Something shifted for me this week but I think it’s going to take a little while for me to understand it in practical terms.

It started out when I was writing February’s “Elephant Burgers” article for my Chasing Wisdom Blog-Zine. I was thinking about ways to offer practical tips for using a daily schedule to move towards your dreams, but I couldn’t figure out how to keep the ideas from sounding boring.

Synchronicity brought me a structure that sparked my creativity. Check out the process I came up with in the article.

I’ve been following this daily planning meeting format all week now. It’s helping me see my forward movement on large goals. It’s helping me treat each goal with respect by scheduling some time each day or a few days a week to work on the goal. And it’s showing me why I feel really busy some days!

Before, I would do the things I thought of as my “to-do” list, like pay bills and write articles and do specific things on my web site or blog. Then, in the unscheduled blocks of time, I would think about what I needed to do and spend some time doing it. Then I would think of something else I needed to do and get sidetracked with that. Sometimes I would look at the more vague things that involve planning or sketching out an idea and leave them until later.

Now I’m looking at an overall plan, seeing the long-term goals and their importance to me, and seeing how each daily step connects with a goal. I actually see myself moving forward more clearly.

Here’s the strange part. I’m not really doing more work, and I’m not doing things in much more of a focused way. I’m just more aware of the usefulness of what I’m doing at the time. That makes my effort seem more practical and more worthwhile. I’m also able to prioritize tasks better using the larger goals.

Here’s why this shift is important to me. Most of what I’m doing is not immediately generating income! I can easily start feeling adrift or uncertain while working on things that don’t give immediate results. But with the daily planning meetings and the goals in front of me every day, I see how my steps are moving me towards an information product, a training session I can offer, or a targeted coaching program.

Things are becoming more real. It’s not “some day, eventually.” It’s “by the end of May.”

There’s something electrifying about this process I’m trying out. I think it could become a signature workshop and teleseminar, a powerful chapter in a book, and a stand-alone e-book with workbook.

I have some decisions to make soon. I attended my first coaching support group as a member and we discussed the differences in newsletters and e-zines. I realized my blog-zine takes a lot more time than a short weekly or semi-weekly newsletter, but I love writing it.

Maybe it’s time to reconsider the format and how I offer it to people. Lots to consider. But I’ll plan time during one of my daily meetings to do just that!

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Good News! I’ve Always Been A Career Mess!

2008-02-22T13:03:00.000-08:00

After I tried to find colleagues on Facebook and LinkedIn last week, I started thinking about places I worked long ago. I went in the way back machine nearly twenty years, to a job I had as a therapist and case manager at a Residential Treatment Center (RTC) in Fort Worth, closed down for many years now.

The first person I thought of was a friend I haven’t seen or talked to in years. We maintained our friendship well past the brief lifetime (was it 21 months or 21 years?) I spent at the RTC. His name is Victor. Victor is passionate and lively and a deep thinker. He’s also pretty driven, which can be a little intimidating at times, but it’s one of the reasons I really liked him from the beginning. But the main reason I “clicked” with Victor was because, in spite of being passionate about many things and wanting to have meaningful work, he had a hard time figuring out a path. A kindred spirit! We had many conversations about how to figure out what we wanted to be when we grew up, even though I was already on a general career path as a therapist.

Victor considered social agency work for a while and thought about a social work degree, but that seemed like a fallback position while he toyed with other ideas. When he got married to a wonderful young lady with similar values and life goals, studying in a similar field, I figured he found his career track.

Then he decided to become a minister! Yes, it’s definitely related, and yes, the ministry needs passionate and deeply thinking people who want to serve others. But it was still a surprise. He got involved in setting up a new church in his denomination. Now that made more sense—applying talents to changing and improving the world and not just settling in to a job.

We dropped out of contact within a year or so of children coming into our families, I think. I went on a Google safari and finally found him, or at least a related listing with a person who could find him. He left the ministry a few years back after serving fully and intensely, then relocated and transitioned to being an insurance agent. Now he’s looking at setting up a non-profit agency to start a private school in his new hometown for kids who aren’t being served. He’s still the same core person, still using his gifts and his passions to define his life, but going through different stages of what that looks like.

Then I called my long-time friend Paige, who also worked with me at the RTC. We actually met in college and then were in the same graduate program. We had practicum assignments (that’s internship without pay) together for a couple of years. When I heard about the job at the RTC just after graduate school, I called her and found out she had just been hired there. When I left the RTC after 21 years (or months?) of dedicated service to work in a private clinic, she had just started there, too! We were invited months before at the same time by the same psychologist, but the timing was amazing.

Paige and I have had many conversations about where we are headed in our careers. Would we pursue doctorates? In what field? Would we work in agencies or in private practice? We both went part-time as therapists and tried other careers, and we both eventually left the mental health field for long periods of time. Now she’s staying home with her children and helping one son get the educational services he needs, using her training in a way she could never have anticipated. It’s the right fit for now, for this time in her life based on the needs of her family.

Reconnecting is wonderful. It’s especially good to remember that I’ve been thinking about “what I want to be when I grow up” since before I was grown up. And it’s really cool to realize I will never figure it out, enter that career, and be done. It’s the wrong question!

The right question for me is—

What do you want to do for this season that honors your calling, uses your gifts, engages your passions, and integrates with the values that guide your life?

See. That’s so much easier to answer!

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Connections, Links, & Binders

2008-02-15T17:19:00.000-08:00

Well I think I pulled it off!

I visited the coaches’ support group on Wednesday and tried to be very good. That’s kind of hard for me.

I listened carefully and said very little. I commented only when I was asked and I tried to make sure I shut up just before I started rambling. I flew in under the radar.

So I’ll be joining the group! They meet by phone every other week for an hour to support each other building their coaching businesses. One very good thing I discovered—coaching businesses look very different for different people.

For some it’s a small secondary part-time practice for a full-time professional. For some it’s having enough individual clients to make it the sole source of income. For others it includes group coaching and training and live events. For others it includes books and internet radio shows and a long-term plan to become a nationally known expert doing little or no individual coaching other than in demonstrations.

I did a little more connecting in other ways this week. I was on a teleseminar about using Facebook and LinkedIn. I searched pretty thoroughly to find people I know on the sites. Then I sent some invites to people I know who weren’t on the sites yet.

Using these sites correctly requires putting up plenty of information on my profile, the teleseminar told me. Plus I need to have a good picture taken and post it. Know any good face doubles?

I moved forward in another way when I brought together ideas from different places and came up with a plan. Barbara Sher recommends having a “Leonardo DaVinci” styled book or binder for keeping lots of creative ideas. She especially recommends this for people who have several ideas going at once and get worried they’ll forget an idea or forget to work on it.

In a strangely related concept, I’ve been discussing with colleagues what sort of business plan a solopreneur needs, especially if no loans or investments are being sought. My third source of inspiration was a collection of interviews, articles, and books that extol the benefits of making visualization boards or keeping long-term goals on computer screen savers so you’re constantly reminded of them.

I put these ideas together and bought a three-ring binder to start collecting all my written ideas and mind maps for areas of my business. (I also got one for any creative ideas that show up.) It’s my visual reminder of all the things that need my attention, a place to gather new ideas and flesh out old ones. Going through it will also help me see where I’ve made progress and accomplished some things.

Could this become the blueprint for a great info product for people wanting to start a small business as a self-employed service provider? I’m not sure, but there’s going to be a page in my binder for that idea.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Moving Forward By Refusing To Go

2008-02-08T22:00:00.000-08:00

There was a business expo in town today. In fact, it was called an Entrepreneurs’ Expo. I’ve been getting e-mail notices for a couple of months. The closer it got the more I thought about attending. I even told my wife I might go to it. But I told her I would go “if I figure out a plan.”

I thought about it last night, and I thought about it this morning while driving one of our dogs to a vet appointment. I figured out when I could leave, how long I could be there before I would need to leave to pick up my son from school, and even how to have a good lunch choice on the way.

But I couldn’t ever think of what I was going for.

I thought about having a small notebook and meeting people and striking up conversations about how they became a business owner or became self-employed. I thought about ways to find the people who would be there just to get ideas, because that’s a big part of the crowd. They are intrigued by business ownership or self-employment but aren’t sure how to go about it. Sounds like exactly the people I should be meeting!

The problem is, I knew what to expect. I’ve been to the Expo before. Back when my family and I got conned into buying a fraudulent “business opportunity.” Yes, conned; the people who ran the company were being pursued by the FTC the last I heard for close to a hundred million dollars worth of fraud.

Maybe that really bad association carried over to my thoughts about the Expo. Maybe, added to that, was the fact the person who talked us into going to the Expo was a marketing consultant from the same marketing training group that I blew thousands of dollars on just two years after the first debacle, and just one year after my second, much less expensive, debacle. (As a happy aside, I got notification that the people who ran scam number two were sentenced to several years and placed securely in a federal penitentiary.)

The marketing training wasn’t a scam, but the people I paid money to join a marketing consulting business only stuck with it seven weeks before leaving the formal partnership and keeping all my money. So maybe there was a second-degree carry-over effect of despising the Expo. But that’s not the main reason I decided not to go!

I thought about who would be there. I read the list of exhibitors. Lots of print shops, janitorial supply companies, suppliers to builders, home-based business “opportunities,” and of course multi-level marketing people.

I thought about the people I met when I went there before. They were small business owners looking for business-to-business customers, and they were opportunity-hawking salespeople. The ones looking into starting a business weren’t at all thinking about their personal gifts or passions or interests. They were looking for a low-cost, low-effort way to make money so they could quit their jobs.

They were in debt and looking for a way out, or in low-pay jobs and thinking it would be easier to find a quick moneymaker on the side that it would be to build their careers.

The thing is, if there really were a quick and easy system to make money with little effort and low overhead, what FOOL would be selling it at a business expo? He (or she) would be setting the system up several times over and becoming stupidly rich.

Self-employment and home-based business ideas that are marketed primarily, or exclusively, on the basis of getting rich and being able to “fire your boss” tend to be shallow. And the people drawn to them aren’t looking for a way to have a meaningful life and meaningful work. They’re looking for an easy fix that’s just a little more expensive and takes slightly more effort than playing the lotto.

I realized I probably wouldn’t find “my people” there, or not many of them—the creative types who know how they like to interact with the world and what they want to offer. And I realized I would be dragged down by all the people desperately grasping at clients or trying to hook a few more people on their “business opportunities” so they could make a quick commission.

We’ve been discussing this dilemma on the career change forum at the Fast Track Your Dream forum. A lot of people offer “systems” and “steps” to take to start a business. They sell plans and how-to books. But cookie cutter plans don’t work for creative people trying to develop businesses that reflect their personalities and values.

For people who don’t feel connected to technology, building an online business is not the right path. For people who want to do individual creative work, setting up a free newsletter and building a mailing or e-mail list might not work.

And for a personal development coach and trainer, walking into a gathering place for the moneychangers from the temple isn’t a good way to find people seeking meaningful change.

So I decided not to go! And I moved myself forward by not moving. Instead of just going because it seemed reasonably connected to my business plan, I thought about it carefully. That helped me define my target market more narrowly and get a clearer idea of my future clients. And the Expo didn’t seem like the place to find them.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Vocation, Vocation, Vocation

2008-02-02T17:07:00.000-08:00

My birthday was this past Wednesday so I gave myself a gift.

Actually, I accepted and moved forward the gift someone else gave me. Gayle Scroggs let me know that a colleague in the Coaching world is accepting new members to a support group for those of us building Coaching businesses.

I contacted the Coach and then she and I had our first conversation Wednesday. I will be “visiting” the virtual group the next time they meet, and if we all agree I’m a good fit I’ll join them.

It will be an important step. Just planning that first phone call got me to move a little bit on thinking about how I want to structure my services and products. Getting a lot of individual Coaching clients doesn’t interest me right now. In fact, it sounds like I would be building my own cage. But planning ways to offer time-limited training groups and time-limited support groups, along with a couple of open-ended support groups, has me excited.

I was reading through 48 Days To The Work You Love by Dan Miller today and was reminded of something important. He discusses the difference between vocation (a calling), career (a path of related work within a field), and a job (one particular instance). I knew for quite a while that I want to honor my vocation, my calling, which I believe is hard-wired into my DNA and into my spirit. But I thought of a vocation as a special level of career, like a more meaningful career. It’s not just his career—it’s his vocation.

But Dan Miller’s view is that career is a subset that can fit under vocation, just as job is a subset that can fit under career. Once you find your vocation, that life calling, you can choose a career that fits with it. Discovering your vocation is not the same as discovering your career. It just helps narrow the choices and points you to the right aisle.

Now I already understood that a person could have a career and not satisfy his or her vocation, and that recreational activities and creative pursuits can help fulfill a vocation. But I had this black and white thinking going on: either your career is your calling or you have a calling that can’t be a lucrative career so you have a career that supports you and you fulfill your calling in other ways.

His notion that a person can discover a vocation and then change careers while staying in the same vocation is transformational for me. My business doesn’t have to be everything in my vocation. It doesn’t have to align carefully and perfectly with every aspect of my calling. It just has to integrate with it.

I know my vocation. I love watching people grow and develop, gain new skills and new confidence, and find out what they’re capable of doing. I love seeing one person extend himself or herself to help another person get the vision and confidence to grow—that’s Mentorship. I love stories because they’re all about personal growth and development in their archetypal forms.

I have to be sure I honor and represent my calling in all my choices. I have to bring it into every aspect of my life. It will shape and help define my business over the years. It will also guide my personal growth and lead me to discover new things about myself that I can share with other people.

This takes some of the stress off of “getting my business right,” but it puts it more firmly on “getting my life right.”

Whew! Clarity and excitement and fear all at once. I must be on the right path again.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Out Of Synch

2008-01-25T15:44:00.000-08:00

Any of you who are sci-fi fans will understand the idea of a phase shift in the time-space continuum. To catch the rest of you up, the idea is that there is something akin to frequency that synchronizes all the “stuff” within a dimension. Change your frequency and you’re in a different dimension or maybe at a different point in time.

Phase shift story lines are really cool because then the people or the aliens can be present but not fully visible, kind of like a ghost. But you can’t interact fully with something that’s out of phase with you, so it quits being fun when you decide you want to talk to someone or eat food.

For the past few days, since a little before we left for Orlando on Christmas Day for the soccer trip, I’m having these experiences of being out of phase. I first noticed it a few days before Christmas when I rushed around to get kids’ activities done and send them on their way to spend the night with their grandparents, then sat on the couch eating an orange and feeling pretty tired.

I totally forgot about a telecourse that night I had signed up for, and had been very excited to hear. When I remembered it later, the memory was like something in the distant past.

More to the point, it was like those dreams where suddenly you realize there’s a test you didn’t take for high school or college, and right now you have to go take it and you’re not prepared. The more frequent version for me is being told I have a final in a class I totally forgot about. I think back and remember I went two or three times and thought it was going to be pretty tough so I’d decided to drop it but I never filled out the paperwork. So I’m heading for the final of a very difficult class having no preparation.

I’ve been feeling like I’m forgetting important things and I’ve been feeling like I’m behind on a lot of things. I’ll think there’s a stack of bills I forgot to pay and run anxiously to the study and go through them. Once my heart gave a somersault because I thought I was two weeks past due sending one off until I noticed the due date was in February.

I fell out of phase again this week. I had an invitation to listen to an interview about personal service marketing for coaches on a conference call. I was happy. It sounded like great information and there was going to be discussion with other coaches.

Then one little thing changed in my schedule. It actually freed me up to pay attention to the call fully instead of squeezing it in, but I had some article writing I started doing. About fifteen minutes after the call ended, when I was telling my sons we could go get some dinner, I remembered the missed call. I felt like I was living parallel lives. It was like I had forgotten my “other self.”

I told a friend yesterday and she said it’s because my birthday is coming up. She said it can dissociate people and give us a disrupted sense of time. I don’t remember experiencing this before with birthdays but it’s a pretty cool explanation. She has studied a lot about shamanism, native spiritual beliefs, and ancient religions so her perspective is always mind-expanding!

Yesterday I picked up some paperwork to finish bookkeeping for a non-profit agency project grant. Ugh! Today I finished my on-line course in ethics and my on-line rules exam to renew my counseling license and then submitted my license renewal. With one task completed and the other set to finish, I’m filling much more in phase. I think I need to do one more thing before everything synchronizes again—but I can’t figure out what it is.

Maybe it is my birthday. Not sure. But I’m moving forward in little steps here and there, getting my writing done, and finding out how much I love the structure of biographies and documentaries.

More on that later when I understand it more fully and can explain it better.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Time For Discovery

2008-01-18T11:15:00.000-08:00

It was a week of questions but not many answers for me.

I like advocating for parenting models and child behavior management models in general based on respect for children and their developmental needs and stages. But people who seek help with parenting either have children with severe behavior problems, so it’s actually a therapy issue, or they are court-ordered to get parent training because they are abusive or at-risk to abuse. I don’t see that translating into parent coaching. One question, then, is How do I incorporate a passion for helping people respect children and mentor them effectively into my business if the target group isn’t interested?

I like individual coaching but realized I don’t want to have a business model where I carve out blocks of my time and have to keep them booked with appointments to maximize my profits. It would keep me from having a business. I distinguish a business from straight self-employment this way: Am I trading my time for money as my only means of earning income, or do I have ways to create and produce something and then sell it again and again? If I’m coaching as much as possible there’s not time to create the products for the business. Another question this week is How much individual coaching do I want to do, and how much can I do and still have time to develop my business?

The biggie, the one I keep coming back to, comes up when I think about marketing. I keep going backwards. I think of ways to get groups of people to hear my message and sign up for a free or low-cost event or product. But that’s supposed to be a step leading towards recurring purchases or a higher-end purchase. I haven’t figured out what that will be yet. I keep stopping myself and reminding myself I need to figure out what I’m trying to market before I come up with a marketing plan. My big question is What are the continuity, or recurring purchase, products and big-ticket products I want to sell?

I looked at taking a group coaching course, a small business coaching course, and an advanced skills course. So far none of them have worked with my schedule. I do realize one of the answers to my questions is to get connected with people building their own coaching and training businesses. Since that’s not working out right now, I will look into joining a coaching support group.

The other answer to my group of questions is to start moving forward. I have to experience and learn and try things out in order to find what will work for me. So action will help me find my way. Lots of experimenting and risk-taking are in my future. It's time for discovery.

Which leads to the biggest question of all. When will I start? I can’t wait to find out!

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Momentum

2008-01-11T10:37:00.000-08:00

The checks I write for bills this month will have my new business name. Hurray?

Opening the account meant, of course, that I ordered checks. They came in. Everything on the other business account has cleared, so I can close it down and transfer the balance to the new account.

There’s this strange angel and devil on my shoulder thing going on. Except neither is an angel nor devil. They’re both annoying teenagers, I think, maybe junior high age.

One says, “Big deal. Same business, new name. That’s exciting? Woo hoo….”

The other one says, “Wow! That’s cool! Your brand new business! What are you gonna’ do with it?”

It is exciting, but not transformative. The business name keeps me focused on what I want my work to be about, so having the name in front of me keeps that idea in my mind more often.

Also, no explanations are necessary. I don’t have to say, “That’s a business name from before when I co-owned a child care center, then used the corporation for a couple of ‘business in a box’ ideas that didn’t work, then kind of used it when I was training to be a marketing and small business consultant.”

I just say, “My business is Discovery Lookout. It’s about helping people and businesses get new perspectives and new ideas so they can change and grow and accomplish big goals.”

Confirmation of the importance of the new start came by serendipity. When serendipity speaks, I like to listen. My web guy found a new color scheme based on what I told him and finished formatting my new copy. He sent me an e-mail earlier this week that the site was updated. Check it out.

Last week I noticed things were moving forward without much immediate effort by me because of planning and work I did in the past. This week, things became even more real. I’m not “thinking about” or “planning” or “ready to launch” a new business name or coaching web site. It’s done. I jumped. Actually, I planned the jump and put things in motion weeks ago, and suddenly this week I was flying off that cliff thinking, “Am I sure this is how I wanted to do it?”

Too late! Twisting roads mean you drive on and see what’s around the corner. It’s kind of the theme Michael Masterson keeps referring to when he talks about his upcoming book Ready, Fire, Aim. (I really need to get an affiliate link for that book, once I read it.)

It’s the power and clarity that doing brings to planning and imagining. I feel the power. I'm looking forward to the clarity.

Just after Iraq invaded Kuwait, the press asked then-President George H W Bush, “What are you going to do about this?” It was an impromptu press conference on a golf course, so he didn’t have a lot of time to prepare, and I laughed at his answer. “We’ll just see what I do.”

Now I get it. I have the general ideas and some principles and guidelines, but I don’t know step by step where this will lead me. We’ll just see what I do.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Forward In Spite Of Myself

2008-01-04T14:32:00.000-08:00

On Christmas Eve Day I put the paperwork and filing fee in the mail to rename my corporation “Discovery Lookout, Inc.”

I left Christmas morning with my sons for Orlando. My older son’s soccer team was in a soccer tournament between Christmas and New Year’s. We came back on New Year’s Day in the early evening.

The next day I had the confirmation from the State of Texas that my corporation has officially been renamed.

Yesterday I went to the bank to change my business account to the new name. New checks are ordered and I should be paying bills later this month with checks that carry the new name.

I had a whirlwind holiday season since we were out of town for over a week. I posted the final three articles for my Blog-Zine on Christmas Eve Day and programmed my autoresponder to notify my list a couple of days after Christmas.

Beyond that, I did absolutely nothing to move my business forward from about a week before Christmas until I went to the bank yesterday. My sons were out of school the week before Christmas and we had a lot of things to do to prepare for Christmas and the trip.

And yet, in spite of my limited time, big things happened. My corporation is officially renamed. My bank account has been changed and my checks will have the new business name. My Blog-Zine is complete for December and I’m on track beginning to write articles for this month’s issue.

It’s good for me to realize that my momentum is actually carrying me forward. I was starting to think, while walking around Universal Studios with my younger son, that I had completely stalled working on my business. Then at night in the hotel room, after the soccer game, trying to fall asleep, I was feeling aimless about the business overall.

But by following simple steps I planned long ago, and meeting a couple of deadlines I scheduled, even with a lower stress schedule I was moving forward.

Write it down and get it down. Plan it, schedule it, and keep yourself accountable. Man! These Coaching ideas actually work sometimes! Most importantly, they carry us through the times when our motivation, our vision, and our passion are taking a sabbatical. A very important lesson for me.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

The Fog of Possibility

2007-12-21T14:52:00.000-08:00

Wednesday night I had the very special honor of guest moderating the Resource Group call for students in the Foundations Coaching class through MentorCoach. Kevyn Malloy, the very warm and gracious woman who taught my Foundations class, was the special guest that night. Kevyn shared the story of her path to Coaching and things she learned along the way.

It was especially important for me because Kevyn told us not to get too fixed on a path or a goal, but to stay open to opportunities that appear. She talked a lot about serendipity, the idea of purposeful chance intervening to bring things into our lives when we need them.

Kevyn discovered Coaching during a time when she was taking a break from being a therapist and trying to restore balance to her life. Sounds kind of like my twisting road. She started the training and began Coaching part-time, not sure what role Coaching would ultimately play in her life. I’m feeling pretty comfortable hearing about her twisting road.

As she worked longer in Coaching, she found areas of specialty where she enjoyed her clients and offered her most inspired Coaching. These areas weren’t the ones she would ever have guessed before she got there. She discovered them because she was willing to try new areas and see how it went. She was willing to accept opportunities that colleagues presented to her.

It was an important time in my life for that message. I’ve been sketching my “ideal client” and trying to decide how much of my business I will dedicate to individual coaching and how much will be group coaching, training, writing, and producing information products. Any answers I come up with are completely guessing and I don’t have a clear direction. But that can be okay—or so I’ve been told.

A friend I knew many years ago told me, when I was early in my therapy career and trying to figure out some long-term goals, that sometimes we don’t see that far ahead. Sometimes we just see the next step. Actually, he was finishing a divinity degree, so he was talking about God revealing only the next step and not the whole path. I’ve never fully embraced that message, even though I keep hearing it when I’m trying to see farther down the road.

This week I moved forward in little steps, writing more articles for my Blog-Zine and sketching out some ideas for topics next year. I’ve spent some creative planning time looking more closely at what characteristics in clients will bring out my best work and what ways of interacting and serving I’ll do best. I’ve started planning ways to keep creative ideas flowing and try out new things.

Little steps are all I can see right now because the distant path is too cloudy. I still don’t like not knowing! But not-knowing is the path to discovering, so I have to embrace not-knowing and look forward to the discoveries.

Clear direction is the end of possibility. When you choose something, you choose not to do something else, at least for a time. I think I’m so enthralled with possibility that choosing feels limiting.

In this coming year, I will choose to try new ideas and explore new directions, always staying open to new opportunities. Man! I sound like a Coach!

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Resistance???

2007-12-14T21:24:00.000-08:00

Lately on the Fast Track Your Dream forum there have been discussions about the idea of resistance. We’re trying to figure out what it is and what it isn’t.

Here goes. Resistance refers to an internal inertia, that inner ball and chain that keeps you stuck in a rut and away from taking on risks. Risks can be too--risky. According to Barbara Sher, this rut-resisting urge is a very primitive form of fear. It keeps us from venturing into dangerous territory so we won’t be harmed. It’s a survival thing going back to primitive man. It’s also about as dumb as primitive man, and doesn’t distinguish between risks like dying and risks like being confused and embarrassed while learning to do something new.

I’m not sure myself if it’s a primitive man thing, but I do like to think of resistance as a primal response that keeps us afraid of change and comfortable with the known. But the known gets boring, so we decide we’re going to jump out of the rut and make some changes! Then resistance says things like, “It’s kind of cold. Wouldn’t you rather stay inside where it’s warm?” and “Who do you know at that group you want to visit? You’ll probably be lonely and you won’t fit in.” It also says, “You should probably organize those files before you try something wild and crazy like writing an article.”

The twist that we’re bouncing around in discussions at Fast Track is that sometimes we resist doing things for perfectly good reasons. We might resist taking a step because we know it’s something we’re not very good at it. The ideal solution would be to ask for help or pay someone to do it for us, but we don’t think that’s reasonable so we try to make ourselves do it. Sometimes we resist a step because it truly is too risky, such as quitting a job and then looking for something more interesting to do. The group also realized we might resist change because something about the direction isn’t right. Maybe it’s a little off course, maybe the timing’s not right, or maybe we sense we’re doing things out of order. It’s a gut feeling, our intuition holding us back without us understanding why.

That’s my theme this week. I finally bought Book Yourself Solid by Michael Port. Early in the book he talks about figuring out who your ideal client is. Pardon my mirth. This was a big stumbling block for me during my Coaching course. I don’t know who my ideal client is. I haven’t even believed it’s reasonable to think about it and to limit my business to those people. I’ve always believed I have to find a way to work with whoever is willing to pay for my services, with my only limits being highly offensive people and those who won’t pay or keep appointments.

I discovered I don’t have a lot of enthusiasm for getting clients. I worry I’ll have to work with people who drain my energy and frustrate me. I don’t want to “book myself solid” yet because I’m afraid I won’t enjoy it very much. So I’m finally going to define my ideal client. I’ve never given myself that freedom, never believed I could choose. It’s about time I figure out who I can do my best work for and get excited about meeting them.

I’ve also been worried I’ll have to spend so much time on individual Coaching that I won’t have time to explore lots of other ideas I have for my business. I had planned to focus first on getting Coaching clients and then on other ideas. I’ve decided to change my plan. I’m going to spend some time each day thinking about other, future areas of my business. And I’m going to dream big.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Twisting Or Roundabouts?

2007-12-07T17:50:00.000-08:00

This week I spent a little bit of time writing for my Blog-Zine, more time planning the rest of this month’s and next month’s Blog-Zine articles, a lot of time reading and watching training DVDs, and a whole lot more time doing things that have nothing to do with my business.

In the “Design your life first, then design your career” model, you start with the kind of life you want to have and the priorities you should honor. From there you find interesting and creative work that complements your life. High up on my list right now is time for my sons’ activities, since my wife is gone from dawn to dusk or later four or five days a week. This week, even though I don’t have my new business up and running at full speed, I was still able to make their activities my priority.

It’s a blessing to know I can give them the extra time once in a while. But I still get anxious when I realize that nothing I did specifically generated new money this week, and my “productive” hours were spent planning, learning, and contemplating.

I still haven’t figured out how to get paid for that. I need to focus on helping other people plan, learn, and contemplate. That’s a paid service!

It didn’t feel like much forward progress. It felt like a lot of waiting. I’m waiting for my web site to be updated when my web master has time. I’m waiting to have more content developed and written so I can offer something—anything—to entice people to sign up to my list and maybe buy a workbook from me.

One of my ideas, which involves packaging training and time-limited Coaching around specific goals and life areas, got me a little excited. When I have been thinking about ways to market Coaching and training to some target groups, it’s felt unclear and I have lacked direction. Having a specific, focused approach for a set amount of time helps me see how to present it. Training and Coaching packages may not produce any more results than offering open-ended Coaching, but it sure helps me “get” the way to start telling the story about what I do!

So maybe it just looked like I was going in circles. Maybe I was seeing a similar view from a slightly different perspective. Maybe there’s a little progress on this journey in there somewhere.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

First Things First

2007-11-30T08:43:00.000-08:00

I took my sons to a fast food (in name only) restaurant for fried chicken on Wednesday after soccer practice. The wait was long and we had to remind the people we were waiting for our food, but there was a silver lining.

My younger son’s meal came packaged in a box with puzzles and games on it. One had three panels of cartoon scenes that we had to put in the right order. His older brother and I got to show him how to decide what comes first—cause and effect. We helped him see that some things can’t happen on their own or without a set-up. You can’t trip over the roller skate until someone has left it carelessly on the floor. You can’t walk into a surprise party until people have shown up. First things first.

I had a similar experience this week when I was checking out some web sites for Coaches and career change consultants. I found at least three sites that had a sidebar button for newsletter archives and there were only two or three issues of the newsletter, stopping several months ago. But there was still a “Sign up for my newsletter” box on the site.

One guy I know, Ken Robert, started a newsletter based on helping people with creative ideas for career change. He refocused and started posting on creative thinking, brainstorming, and mind mapping for all sorts of problem solving. But he told his list he was making the change in focus and format and invited us along. These others just left people hanging.

Or did they? That’s probably the problem. They heard the normal mantra: “You have to have a newsletter.” They started one. They asked people to sign up. Maybe three or four did, but after three months of writing content and sending it out there didn’t seem to be a point.

This week I’ve heard and been reminded of about a dozen ideas for getting my message out to people. All these ideas have started with the presumed list. I heard ideas on what to tell my list and how to use creative new ways to package the information or make special offers. But I don’t have a big list yet.

First things first. I’m building a list, very slowly. I have all sorts of plans I can put into place once I have a larger list, but we’re not to that panel yet. I have to build my list or I’ll be wasting my time implementing to no audience.

I’ve had to remind myself that in the meantime I can still be working on things to have ready when the list starts growing. I can plan time-limited groups that combine training and coaching for parents. I can plan telecourses on creative career change ideas. I can put together workbooks to complement someone else’s book and sell them together in a package. But I can’t roll out any of these things without a list.

So I’m feeling a little bit like Noah—yes, delusions of grandeur and all! Noah built that danged boat for decades, with everyone asking him when it was going to rain. I’m not getting teased and no more people think I’m crazy than thought it before, but it’s causing a lot of self-questioning. I don’t have a history of designing programs or products that brought in money and satisfied customers to motivate me. I have to work completely on faith that what I’m doing now will bring revenue in the future. It leaves me feeling like I’m drifting sometimes. I’m pretty sure that’s what happens to a lot of Coaches when they try to get their story in front of potential clients but don’t get many nibbles.

And there’s a problem to be solved that can become a great business model. Hmmm…..

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Virtual Hiccups

2007-11-23T15:36:00.000-08:00

Technology “dead-legged” me again this week. For those of you who didn’t go to junior high, “dead-leg” is one of the many phrases for the trick of coming up behind someone and pushing—okay, kicking—the back of their leg as they take a step. If you hit the right spot (Hey, come one! Like I would even know where that is? ;-) the person stumbles. It’s similar to, but not as elegant as, gently tapping the ankle as it’s moving forward, just before it moves in front of the other leg, so it winds up crossed behind the other leg. You can get someone to trip nearly every time with that one (from comments I’ve heard).

I had my three final articles for November loaded into my Blog-Zine site and ready to be published. My plan was to go click-click-click and have everything finished in a couple of minutes. But I posted the first one and noticed it looked odd. The formatting was mixed up. Same for numbers two and three.

I went into the edit mode of WordPress and the appearance of my article was different. It wasn’t simple font with some HTML code saying “strong” for bold or “em” for italics or things like that. It looked just like a Word document in Times New Roman with bolded letters and italicized letters. But the spacing was completely messed up, as in gone. It was one long paragraph.

I had to find the originals, copy and paste, and then re-format them so they would look right.

I’m pretty sure WordPress didn’t change, because I have to ask my site to upgrade or it won’t get a new version. My browser updated recently, but it was before I posted the new articles. I have NO CLUE what happened between me uploading the articles and being ready to post them. But they look fine now. Check it out.

I realized a while back that I need a little more technological savvy to get comfortable building a Coaching business. Now I post to this blog and occasionally my Evil Twin Blog in Blogger, I participate in a group blog in TypePad, and my Blog-Zine is in WordPress. I’m gonna’ be so confused!

I even volunteered to be part of the small committee for the Parenting Coaches’ group that will focus on marketing in general and blogging and web sites specifically. Who am I fooling? Apparently, that group! Actually, I’ve learned a few things that put me a step or two ahead of the crowd so they think I’m knowledgeable. Poor things. See how we’re doing so far. The blog is called Parenting By Strengths.

I added a little more confusion this week. I finally chose a theme for my own TypePad blog. I’m going to post about the struggles and finds of doing personal professional service marketing. I know! I can hardly wait, too!

Check out my Anything But Marketing! Blog. Post taunting or commiserating comments as you see fit. There are a lot of us who want to work with people but get completely stuck by the idea of having to market ourselves, which feels insincere and even cheap. Hopefully we’ll come up with some approaches we can at least tolerate and maybe even some we can enjoy.

Onward! Into the technological void! (no bathroom humor intended)

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

The Graduate

2007-11-16T08:32:00.000-08:00

This past Wednesday was the final class for the eleven students in the Coaching Foundations course titled MCP 103. We had our final hour-long tele-class where we focused on planning our future Coaching businesses. This included a demonstration by our instructor, Dr. Kevyn Malloy, of a visualization exercise to help create a vision for the future.

We each also brought a “virtual dish” to share in the feast. Coaches use a lot of imagination, creativity, analogies, and metaphors. Our dishes were in that spirit. Some class members compared the comfortable feeling and the warmth of the seven-month experience to a favorite comfort food. Others talked about ingredients representing the way individual class members had touched and changed their lives. Others talked about a special beverage that was festive and celebratory to focus on our shared accomplishments.

If you’ve been Coached, if you’re a writer or into other creative arts, or if you have a background in psychology that includes imagery or the use of symbols, you can probably appreciate the experience we had. If not, it might sound totally bonkers!

The language of Coaching is forward moving, action-oriented, and positively slanted. As a result it can sound falsely optimistic or insincere at times. But having been trained, and having Coached people, I understand better now that the experiences of Coaching can touch the core of a person. The images and thoughts resonate with your strongest feelings and deepest sense of identity. That’s is surprisingly energizing and exciting. The words are festive and upbeat. But often the experience can be profound, bringing awareness that seems like it “should” be uncomfortable or unsettling to realize, but which is actually very comforting.

Living our lives with the general notion of “fitting in” we tend to downplay our passions and strong interests and deep values. We think it can cause conflict to express them so we don’t speak them often, and when we do we try to be moderate. Coaching turns that around. Coaching celebrates the uniqueness of each person. It helps you find long-forgotten interests and claim important values—out loud! That brings power and clarity that are missing in most of our daily lives.

You’ll get a chance to meet some of my classmates in the future. I’ll keep up with them and share stories of their successes and let you know about tele-courses and e-books and other things they will do.

Right now you can start with one of them. Sarah Sharp wrote an article for my Chasing Wisdom Blog-Zine about using your personal mission to focus and simplify your schedule. I think you’ll enjoy it.

I’m a complete fan of MentorCoach because of the courses, the student support, and the close and supportive community. Our instructor, Kevyn Malloy, is warm and thoughtful and very wise. Gayle Scroggs who runs the weekly student resource group is shade on a sunny day. With all the extras MentorCoach offers alumni, they create exceptional value. These include free interviews with leading researchers and pioneers in Positive Psychology and Coaching demonstration calls. I can listen live and also download them afterwards to my iPod.

If you’re even toying with the idea of learning to be a Coach, check out MentorCoach.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Autoresponders and HTML

2007-11-09T13:54:00.001-08:00

This past week I signed up for an autoresponder. For those of you who don’t know or haven’t even heard of autoresponders, it’s an online software program that lets me capture e-mail addresses and names when people sign up to receive my newsletter. When I send out my newsletter (at least once a month) it will go to everyone on the list.

Autoresponders have other uses, too. For example, you can set up a brief e-mail training course on a particular topic. When a person signs up the autoresponder sends out the e-mails in a sequence. You can set it up to send the first one right away, a second one two days later, a third after two more days, and so forth. This would be great if you wrote a “5 Tips” or “5 Steps” kind of article. Each e-mail could contain one of your tips or steps and explain how to apply it.

Autoresponders can send out weekly e-mails for a year-long series, like steps to gaining freedom from consumer debt or motivational ideas or a series of spiritual devotionals. They can send out daily tips or quotes. You can set them up to send out as many things as you want in a series, at any interval you decide. They’re pretty cool.

They can also be set up as a follow-up to an online order. The first in a series might be “thank you” for ordering. The next, a few days later, might be to remind the person a package is coming and point out some extra features and benefits of the product. The third might be meant to arrive after the package to ask for feedback. The fourth might contain an unexpected extra bonus or further uses for the product. After that, maybe the customer gets an e-mail every two or three weeks for a short while, letting him or her know about other products available. Then the interval might go up to every four to six weeks, just to keep you in their thoughts.

Since I integrated my autoresponder with my Blog-Zine, I got to learn a little more about HTML. At least, I think that’s what I was doing. I had to go into the template for the blog site and add the code that put the sign-up form on my site. Then I had to configure the sign-up form and set up web pages on the blog to thank people for signing up. So far, it seems to be working. Check it out at Chasing Wisdom.

It’s meant I spent a lot of time on technical and specific skills and less on creative and long-term vision skills. It was a nice break, and I enjoy learning about some computer things—some. I hope to be able to make minor changes to my site by myself over time. But I don’t want to have to spend a lot of my time every week learning the programming stuff. I’m glad to learn a little and move on.

And I’m glad to ask for help when I need it. My webmaster will be helping me update my main site over the next few weeks. I’ll let you know when it’s up and ready to debut.

Do not fear web sites. Do not fear blog sites. Start with something simple, get comfortable with it, and then keep learning. You will enjoy the ability a web site gives you to get your message to people, and the creative energy that starts flowing when you get your own blog.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

On The Twisting Road

2007-11-02T08:54:00.000-07:00

Last week I was grousing about marketing—complaining that it’s unpleasant. And then I had an idea.

In My Discovery Day, a post on my Blog-Zine, I wrote about a long bike ride with a friend when I was not in shape for it. My friend rode his bike for exercise regularly. I rode mine for fun occasionally.

Marketing can be a large, involved task. You can’t hop on your bike and take on the hills and the many miles without some preparation. The best preparation is to ride on a regular basis for a comfortable amount of time, then go further and add more hills. If you’re regularly riding four miles on level roads and occasionally taking paths with hills, it’s not that big a step to take on seven miles with hills along the way.

I realized I am already marketing. I set up a Blog-Zine and completed a month of posts. I need to keep that pace and add a hill—setting up an auto-responder for people to sign up and be notified when my Blog-Zine is posted.

I have my business cards ready and people in my social network know I’m starting a coaching business. It’s time to talk more openly about it. That’s not a huge change or a big step, just a small one.

The owner of my son’s Tae Kwon Do studio asked me to do training on managing children’s behavior for the instructors. I can build on that experience and train other instructors or seek out similar opportunities at child care centers and private schools. With free or low-free training, I’ll give people a chance to get to know me and understand how I can be of help.

Coaches help people set goals then break them down into manageable steps. With help and guidance from friends training to be coaches, I had planned comfortable steps to start marketing my business. I hadn’t talked with anyone about marketing in a while, so I forgot my next step is—well, just a step, not a leap. I don’t need to build a comprehensive marketing system in a month. I need to keep doing the steps I’ve started and add the next one.

One step is choosing a focus for this blog. I started it when Barbara Sher challenged her list to begin a blog tracking the steps we’re making on changing careers. I used it along the way to try out some ideas for articles about coaching topics as preparation for writing my Blog-Zine. Going forward, I want to keep the focus on creative career choices and career change.

This will be a blog about discovering a career path and how that is revealed little by little over time. I’ll track my own steps and things I’ve learned, and I’ll write about other people’s struggles and discoveries.

Since I titled my Blog-Zine Chasing Wisdom, I am going to change the name of this blog. My friend Stella helped me see that rambling along unexplored roads takes you to new towns and more new roads. She helped me see that the journey is often the point, because you have to create your future instead of driving straight to it.

With many thanks to Stella, I am re-naming this blog Twisting Road. Pack your bags and come along.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Running Low On Distractions—Any Suggestions?

2007-10-26T16:40:00.000-07:00

This week I got my scheduled posts onto my Blog-Zine, got my business name reserved and the paperwork in progress to make it official, and picked up my new business cards.

Well, I’m on my way, so I can stop posting here. I’ve arrived….

I know, I know, but when will I have arrived? When will this blog I use to track my transition to a new career become obsolete? Maybe when I have certification as a coach, as many clients as I want, and success with my first information product. It’s hard to say.

I may just keep going, since having your own business is not a stagnant and predictable thing. Maybe I’ll continue to post what I learn about trying to have a business that comes from my deepest interests and passions and way of understanding things.

I expect a change of title is coming. Since I’m using “Chasing Wisdom” for the Blog-Zine I’ll think of something to reflect the specific focus of this blog.

My next big step is to go from practice clients (the free ones who have successfully moved on) to paying clients. This blog may become a tale of marketing efforts, flops, and hopefully a few successes. Marketing is, after all, the key to a successful business.

I wanted to settle on a business name. That’s done. I wanted to get a plan for my Blog-Zine and get started. That’s done. I wanted to get different business cards I could hand out that fit my planned work as a coach and mentorship trainer. That’s done. I felt like I needed to complete these tasks so I could focus hard on finding clients.

Now those distractions are gone. I found some new ones, trying to learn about formatting on different blog services. I now have sites with Blogger, WordPress, and TypePad. I’ve spent many hours finding out how to do simple things. It feels like wasted time. I have to focus on creating and posting content instead of obsessing over format. That can become my new distraction that keeps me from focusing on getting clients.

It’s time to face the marketing beast. I hope he’s one of those Scooby Doo monsters, just some manageable worry in a freaky costume. I dread marketing more than cleaning bathrooms. I’ve got to find some new approaches, new perspectives, and a new attitude.

As soon as I have money coming in, I need to get a coach!

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Blog-Zine Launched! Business Named! Business Cards Ordered!

2007-10-19T09:35:00.000-07:00

I have put up my first article at my Chasing Wisdom Blog-Zine!

I have the month of October planned out. The tricky part is planning the order I want to have my blog-zine appear when each article is posted, then posting them in reverse so they line up correctly.

I have half the articles written and a couple more sketched out so they’ll all be up by the end of October.

Once I get my rhythm down my plan is to post the first through fourth weeks of each month. I’ll either post two shorter items or one lengthier item each week.

The business now has a name and a web address, although nothing is up at the site yet. I chose Discovery Lookout. The word Discovery wouldn’t let go of me. The word is about trying new things and personal insight and discussions where creative ideas are formed. It’s about getting out of ruts and challenging yourself and having fun. It’s about personal growth.

Lookout is the image of being on a trail in the mountains and coming to a point where you can see across the landscape. You see things below in scale and in relation to each other, and you see far into the distance. It’s the metaphor for seeing your past experiences, your current goals, and your future vision from the point of view of a Mentor.

Discovery Lookout is a metaphor for Mentorship. A Mentor walks with you on the trail and helps you find the place where you can get that magnificent view. You see your goals and your obstacles and find a path to get where you want to go. You see your vision for the future and get inspired to do the work of getting organized, learning new skills, blazing new trails, and overcoming those obstacles.

Once the business was named I settled into the task of updating my business cards. Having the right name seemed like it was the thing holding me back.

But as I worked I realized I don’t want or need to have the business name on my card. My card has my mission at the top, which I rewrote just a little: Be a Catalyst for Personal Growth Through Genuine Relationships That Expand to Transform Families, Groups, and Organizations. It has my name and contact information. And it lists my Chasing Wisdom Blog-Zine web address. Simple, clear, and focused on marketing.

Once they’re ready I’ll see if I still like them, and how long it takes until I’m ready to change them. I keep hearing to order a small number so I can make changes and updates without wasting cards. I only ordered 100. I think I can give out that many before I need to make any more changes!

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Telecourses Complete! Marketing Looms Ahead

2007-10-12T13:15:00.000-07:00

This week on Tuesday evening my coaching classmate Henry Packer and I presented our telcourse on Creative Career Choice. Actually, that was the subtitle. It was called “The Ferris Bueller Approach to Career Choice.” That stirred up a lot of interest. We had a lot of people sign up and most of them actually called in to participate on the call.

I’ve been reading and studying and talking about creative paths to career choice and ways to make a living that are in line with a fulfilled life for several years. I’ve heard lots of creative and powerful techniques for discovering gifts and passions and answering the question: What do I really want to do with my life?

But when Henry first mentioned his idea to me I was blown away. He started years ago by marking a day on his planner with “FB” for the movie. It was the day after his wife left town for a business trip and he had been very busy helping with preparations. He watched the movie, then went out and had a real-life, toned down version of an adventurous day off. He left it open so he could follow his whims and enjoy whatever came up. He’s been doing it on an infrequent but sort of regular basis ever since.

Henry’s understanding is that we have to be alone sometimes to hear our own hearts speaking. We have to take away the hectic demands and the compulsion to be accomplishing and engage the rest of our brains, and our hearts.

I love the idea of taking a day off, not a weekend but a work day, to go have fun and play. It’s a real-life version of thought exercises that ask people to imagine their Perfect Day, or a Day From Heaven. The thought exercise is fun and opens up a lot of wishes and desires, but getting out and actually living it helped me see which wishes and desires were important enough for me to use my time and energy to pursue.

I have now finished both the free telecourses I committed to presenting with partners and am at the end of introductory coaching training. We’re talking a lot about marketing now. I know, I know. I have to get out and tell people about coaching. I have to think of ways to bring some positive new ideas to their lives so they see the value of coaching and will be interested in paying for regular coaching in the future.

I need to finish drafting out my web site and get it published. I need to continue sketching ideas for e-books and presentations and turning outlines into finished material. I need to start making regular posts to my blog-zine.

Now, when was it I was going to start posting to my blog-zine? I’m pretty sure my goal was October—this October, 2007. Am I going to get to it soon, or will I put it off?

In the timeless words of President George H. W. Bush (41, the first), when asked what he was going to do after Iraq under Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, “Let’s just see what I do.”

I can’t wait to find out!

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

One Down, One to Go!

2007-10-07T12:22:00.000-07:00

On Wednesday evening Sarah Sharp and I presented a telecourse on Cultivating Community. It was my first time to be presenting on a telecourse but I wasn't very nervous, just a little excited and kind of anxious.

Sarah had a good story as an example of people choosing to develop community. She told about a fish market where the employees decided to have fun in spite of whatever personal frustrations or hassles they had going on. As they had fun, it started a sense of connection. When they decided on a goal, to become “world famous,” the common goal plus the decision to focus on enjoying work pulled them together into a more cohesive group. Everyday people doing work that could seem boring and repetitious, but they found a way to make it more. They transcended their circumstances through a common goal and mutual commitment.

Our participants joined in the conversation and shared a lot of ideas and thoughts on ways that individuals can help bring more connection and common purpose into groups so community connections are strengthened. We discussed values like compassion and mutual respect that we think are necessary to strengthening community, plus common goals and a willingness for group members to take time once in a while to see how the group is doing at meeting its goals and functioning as a community.

Sarah is a polished presenter whose enthusiasm and warmth come across clearly. It was great to have her as a partner because she was memorable and took the pressure off of me. I knew people would have a good experience based on what she shared and the conversations she led. I was able to be very comfortable when I was giving information and leading discussions.

This Tuesday I have my second telecourse. This one will be on Creative Career Choice. I hope it goes as smoothly as the first one did. Since a telecourse is a “live” event with group participation and technology is involved, unplanned things can happen.

I’m ready for the expected and think I can navigate most of the unexpected. If Henry and I wind up with things we can’t handle—well, then, we’re gonna’ have some great stories to tell!

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Blog, Blog, Blog, Telecourse!

2007-09-30T17:49:00.000-07:00

I’ve added links to other blogs where I will be posting. They’re on the left, the top list, if I arranged things correctly.

I have been participating in weekly discussions with a group of Parenting Coaches who have decided to use a group blog to post articles by different coaches on topics helpful to parents. Please check it out. It’s called Parenting By Our Strengths.

I went for the first time this month to the meeting of the North Texas chapter of ICF, the International Coach Federation. At the meeting I met a couple of people who said a group were gathering after the luncheon to talk about faith-based coaching. I had not thought about coaching from a faith perspective but realized it’s a powerful idea. I have tried to keep up with Christian Counseling over the years to understand reasons some Christians are reluctant to seek mental health services, why they might distrust therapists, and how to talk about emotional healing in the language of faith. I am Christian and have always connected the healing work of a therapist with Christ’s message of forgiveness and restoration and hope, so I never experienced that resistance.

The group was coincidentally meeting for the first time and one of the members started a blog, posted to it, and invited others to join and post. I jumped in and wrote a short article. Check it out at Faith Based Coaching.

I also wrote a lengthy first draft of my Discovery Day to shape into an article for the premiere of my Chasing Wisdom Blog-Zine. I will be learning through writing it and formatting it and intend to make it interesting and useful. Check it out and let me know your thoughts.

My first telecourse will be Wednesday of this coming week so I’ve been working to get ready for it. My second telecourse will be Tuesday of the following week. Thank you to those of you who have signed up and those of you who have wished me well and encouraged me. I look forward to what we’re going to learn.

My neurotic thought of recent weeks: Do I have a coaching business that will include e-books, audio recorded presentations, and maybe a membership community? Or do I have a personal mentorship business with a variety of products and media which includes coaching as one of the services offered? It may be an insignificant distinction but it’s on my mind a lot as I develop a business plan and a marketing plan!

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Brief and Cryptic

2007-09-21T21:34:00.000-07:00

I was planning the creative career choice telecourse with my classmate Henry and he said he was planning to take a “Ferris Bueller” day off before we present the course. The concept was something he had told me about and became the main theme of our presentation so it sounded like a good idea to have fresh information to share.

Then he asked me if I was planning to have a Ferris Bueller day off.

I hadn’t planned to—until he asked me. Of course it made sense, and it sounded like a blast.

I spent today having my day off. I called it my “Discovery Day.” I experienced some fun and interesting things and learned more about my interests and what I need to include in my life. No details yet, since I’m still thinking about it and planning to write a blog-zine article based on my experience and what we will present in the course.

At this point I encourage everyone to remember to take time for fun, for whimsy, for whatever is missing in your daily life that you really enjoy and value. Heck, if you can take time off to go to the dentist, you can take time off to go to the beach.

I didn’t go to the beach, because we don’t have one close, but I probably would have if it could have been done within a single day!

I’ve been carrying a thesaurus and dictionary around, thinking about words that describe the work of coaching and the ideas of personal mentorship and personal growth and improvement through the synergy of relationships. It’s been fun—I’m weird like that, but I know people who read dictionaries for fun. Thinking about the words that describe my work and my business has helped me think of new ways to help people as a coach, new ideas for information products, and new metaphors for explaining what I do.

But I still don’t have a name I like that is available as a URL and for a business entity in Texas! I’ll keep at it.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Cultivating Community Telecourse

2007-09-17T10:41:00.000-07:00

CULTIVATING COMMUNITY
Practical Steps and Spiritual Principles
Wednesday, October 3rd at 8:00PM (Eastern)
Presenters: Sarah Sharp and Steve Coxsey
Contact: steve@stevecoxsey.com

TELECOURSE DESCRIPTION:

Do You Ever Feel Lonely When You’re In A Group?

Like you don’t really connect? Like things are pleasant on the surface but there’s not much underneath?

Do you hear stories about people long ago having close connections to each other and wish it were still possible? Do you wonder if it ever really existed?
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There’s a growing disconnect in the world. Larger and larger populations live in closer and smaller spaces, but people seem to be forgetting that anyone else exists!

In this workshop we will explore ways you can encourage connection and community within the various groups of people you interact with on a regular basis. We’ll discuss the values of a functioning community and ways to promote them whenever you’re with other people.
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You will learn:

• A model of community at a deep level of connection and cooperation
• The values of a functioning community
• The stages of development for a functioning community
• Many of the challenges to maintaining a thriving community and how to resolve them
• A model for sustainable group leadership through community based on collaboration and consensus among servant leaders
• Specific steps you can take to promote community in groups where you are a member
• An approach to finding an optimum balance between individual and group identity using the dependence continuum
• Ways that participation in community energizes your personal growth
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This won’t be a philosophical discussion of some unattainable ideal. We’re not yearning for Shangri La. This will be a real life, present day, roll-up-your-sleeves interactive workshop to help you find ways to build a foothold for community in the immediate circle of people around you—beginning with you. You will be challenged to plan real steps you can take to start bringing people together into community in your own life.
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LEADERS:
Sarah Sharp has made it her mission to help unite people with their fullest potential, and then teach them to teach others to do the same. She has spent the past five years coordinating training events on topics such as Communication Skills, Conflict Resolution, and Generational Differences. She spent time as an advocate for her employees, planning team-building and morale-boosting events. Working for a decade in healthcare administration, she was also an advocate for patients, helping to build systems and protocols to ensure good customer service, building a sense of importance as an individual as well as a place within the larger healthcare community. She has merged her attention to detail and her love of people into a budding career as a highly entertaining and intensive speaker. Sarah believes that as each person works toward their own good potential, everyone benefits and community is fostered and flourishes.

Steve Coxsey is passionate about the power of mentorship to promote personal growth and strengthen groups into community. He spent three years working in schools helping teachers brainstorm behavior management and individualized instruction for students, along with planning ways to promote cooperation in the classroom. He worked as a therapist at a treatment center for two years and then in private practice for six years before becoming co-owner of a childcare center and preschool. As a supervisor of programs for children, he was concerned daily about the children having a sense of belonging and connection. As a supervisor of several employees, he was always looking for ways to promote a sense of cooperation and shared purpose. Early on he thought of that as a sense of “family” or “teamwork” but has come to realize he was actually working to develop and maintain a thriving community for all the children and staff.
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TUITION: This telecourse is free. You pay only any long distance charges to access our bridge line.
TO REGISTER: E-mail your registration to steve@stevecoxsey.com. Place the words “Genuine Community” in the subject line. In the body of the e-mail please include: 1) Your full name; 2) Your e-mail address to receive confirmation and other information on the course; and 3) Your daytime and evening phone numbers. In response you will receive confirmation of your registration and access numbers for the bridge line.

ALL REGISTRATION INFORMATION IS CONFIDENTIAL AND WILL NOT BE SHARED. We will not sell, rent, share, or exchange your contact information with anyone.

QUESTIONS?
Contact Steve at steve@stevecoxsey.com or Sarah at scandelon@aol.com.

Become the catalyst to build the connections you’ve been missing. Take a stand for community!
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Creative Career Choice Telecourse

2007-09-17T10:39:00.000-07:00

The Ferris Bueller Approach to Career Choice
Freeing Yourself to Choose Work You Love

Life isn't about finding yourself.
Life is about creating yourself.

~ George Bernard Shaw

DATE AND TIME: Tuesday, October 9, 2007 at 8:00p (Eastern)
PRESENTERS: Henry Packer and Steve Coxsey
CONTACT: steve@stevecoxsey.com

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TELECOURSE DESCRIPTON:

Do You Feel Stuck In A Career That Doesn’t Suit You?

Did You Pick The Practical Path for Security?
Did You Choose What You Were Supposed To Do Over What You Wanted To Do?
Can You Remember What You Wanted To Do?

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More than at any time in history, we have the freedom to choose work that we can enjoy. The technology of the information age makes it possible to consult, train, teach, and sell across great distances. It’s getting easier and easier to find clients and customers who want what we can offer through work based on our unique abilities. It’s possible to find work we enjoy, work that brings fulfillment and contentment, work that feeds our souls as well as pays the bills.

But a lot of us have lost track of what we want to do. We chose things we were good at doing. We chose things we stumbled into and thought, Why not? We chose what our parents had done, or always wanted to do. We set aside our wants and dreams, thinking they were childish and impractical, and settled into a rut.

It’s time to remember what you want to do, because it comes from the deepest part of you. It’s time to embrace your dreams. It’s time to climb out of that rut!

This telecourse is designed to give you some exercises you can use to rediscover what you want to do when you grow up. We will show you ways to listen to your heart’s desire, your soul’s call, that part of yourself that has a unique way of seeing things and a unique combination of gifts and talents. This points you to work that engages your mind and your emotions. This is the work you were born to do, and it brings you the highest level of contentment and personal success.

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You Will Learn:
• Common reasons for choosing a career don’t hold up over time
• Alternatives to having a job that people are really doing successfully
• How Multiple Profit Centers can be greater security than a job and more connected to your deepest nature
• A Career Choice model for planning work around your life
• Exercises you can use to hear your heart’s desire and discover your gifts and passions
• Practical steps to take to bring more happiness and enjoyment into your life—even at work!

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LEADERS:
Henry Packer is journeyman life coach, professional computer geek, aspiring actor/author, and recovering malcontent. Raised in the theater and later a literature major, he found his true callings early in life. As an alumnus of Woodstock (the first one) he valued the ideal of dropping out, but he took the responsible path and became a systems analyst, work that kept him fed, housed, and unsatisfied. In years of quiet pragmatism, he knew that dropping out needs to be an occasional activity, and he has become an authority on the art and science of the Day Off. A recreation, a diversion, and an extraordinary method of regaining oneself.

Steve Coxsey is passionate about personal growth and development. He was a consultant for teachers before working as a therapist at a treatment center and then in private practice. He spent ten years as co-owner of a childcare center and preschool, where he put into practice the power of mentorship to promote personal growth. As a supervisor of programs for children, he was able to collaborate with teachers and caregivers on ways to help children learn new skills and approach challenges with confidence. As a supervisor of several employees, he got to help them set personal goals for professional growth and reach outside their comfort zones to learn new things. He helped many develop long-term career plans that honored their dreams. Steve has been on a journey to discover his next calling and loves helping people discover their passions and gifts and find ways to design work around them.

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TUITION: This telecourse is free. You pay only any long distance charges to access our bridge line.

TO REGISTER: E-mail your registration to steve@stevecoxsey.com. Place the words “Genuine Community” in the subject line. In the body of the e-mail please include: 1) Your full name; 2) Your e-mail address to receive confirmation and other information on the course; and 3) Your daytime and evening phone numbers. In response you will receive confirmation of your registration and access numbers for the bridge line.

ALL REGISTRATION INFORMATION IS CONFIDENTIAL AND WILL NOT BE SHARED. We will not sell, rent, share, or exchange your contact information with anyone.

QUESTIONS?
Contact Steve at steve@stevecoxsey.com.

Get out of the rut! Discover what you love to do and plan your life around it!

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Looking Forward To Figuring Out What I Learned—Once My Head Clears

2007-09-15T20:01:00.000-07:00

I was pretty sure this post would be about my experience at the local chapter meeting of the ICF (International Coach Federation). Friday was my first opportunity to attend a group meeting during lunch at a very nice restaurant in Dallas called Popolo’s.

I thought I would compare what was going on with that group with my experiences with my MentorCoach class. I thought I would have some ideas about moving my business forward.

Nah. A little bit of itchy-nose allergies became a stuffy head cold by Friday afternoon and wiped me out. I got the headache and cough today, Saturday. Insight doesn’t come through very clear when your head and ears are stuffed up!

I enjoyed meeting new people at the luncheon and will attend again and probably join the local group. They have a training session during the monthly meeting and that will be an opportunity to learn more about variety in the world of coaching.

The training this time was on group coaching, with a live demonstration. Having just completed training modules on group coaching through MentorCoach I thought it was a good way to see a real experience to compare with the guidelines and recommendations.

But that’s about all I figured out. My nose was itchy during the training, and by the time I got my sons from school I was feeling crummy. I probably won’t know what else I learned until I feel better.

There was another snag during the week. I can’t have a business entity named Discovery Partners in the state of Texas because there’s a limited partnership with that name. It throws another wrench in my plans so I have to back up, find a name that represents my business, and make sure the name is available for a corporation and a URL. At least having this annoying cold is distracting me from the frustration of trying to get a name that brings together a business entity, a URL, and my mission.

I think I’ll seriously consider calling it “Stick” again. I need to see if that’s already taken.

May Your Nose Be Clear and

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Forward! V-Groups are Near

2007-09-07T16:38:00.000-07:00

This past week I have done a few things to move me closer to a thriving coaching practice.

I got telecourse titles and times decided and planned with my partners (see below).

I helped draft the outlines for each of the telecourses.

I worked on some of the marketing copy for one of the v-groups with one of my partners.

I used newly learned skills in basic mind-mapping to help look at different ways to structure my blog-zine.

I listened to a call on executive coaching and got the chance to hear it compared to small business coaching to help me decide I will probably take small business coaching first, maybe early next year.

I wrapped up three successful months of coaching with my first “practice” client, who felt like she accomplished many of her goals and has great new skills and ways of approaching important decisions in her life.

In keeping with the original spirit of this blog—Barbara Sher encouraging people to post our successes and steps forward—I will not detail the areas where I didn’t make the progress I wanted or didn’t do anything at all!

Below is a list of all the v-groups being offered by members of my introductory coaching class:

V-Groups for MCP103

CREATING COMMUNITY
Wednesday, October 3rd at 8:00PM (Eastern)
Presenters: Sarah Sharp and Steve Coxsey
Contact: steve@stevecoxsey.com

THE SPIRITUAL LAWS OF PARENTING
Monday, October 8th at 1:00PM (Eastern)
Presenters: Donna Allen and Irma Best
Contact: igbest@bellsouth.net

THE FERRIS BUELLER APPROACH TO CAREER CHOICE:
Freeing Yourself To Choose The Work You Love
Tuesday, October 9th at 8:00PM (Eastern)
Presenters: Steve Coxsey and Henry Packer
Contact: steve@stevecoxsey.com

SIMPLIFY YOUR LIFE: Shaping Your Day-To-Day Around Your Personal Vision
Wednesday, October 10th at 8:00PM (Eastern)
Presenter: Sarah Sharp
Contact: scandelon@aol.com

NAVIGATING THE GENERATIONAL DIVIDE WITH YOUR CLIENTS
Thursday, October 11th at 8:00PM (Eastern)
Presenters: Dee Covey and Kyle Kinder
Contact: deecovey@dsprinc.com

LEARNED OPTIMISM: An Introduction To The Basics of Positive Psychology
Friday, October 19th at 12:00PM
Presenters: Betty Reinsch and David Litton
Contact: david@davidlitton.com

CHANGING CAREERS
Friday, October 19th at 1:00PM
Presenter: Doris Muniz
Contact: dmuniz@sbcglobal.net

Please sign up if you are able! They are free but on bridge lines that require a PIN to access so e-mail the presenter for more information or to enroll.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

V-Groups Are In My Future

2007-08-31T20:36:00.000-07:00

As we approach the end of our personal coaching introductory course, our class is learning about doing virtual groups for training and for ongoing coaching. As a project we are encouraged to plan and present a one-hour telecourse alone or with a partner, which will be announced to students and alumni of the training organization.

After I had a partner for one v-group (virtual group) I had another classmate ask if I wanted to partner for a group. I decided to do two groups to get more experience and move me closer to a thriving coaching practice.

One partner has a great idea for doing a presentation on finding enjoyable work in a creative way. He calls it the “Ferris Bueller” approach to career choice and it’s a fantastic idea. I’ll be able to bring along things I’ve learned in my career change group at Fast Track Your Dream, plus books I’ve read and telecourses I’ve attended or heard by recording that focus on finding your true calling and designing work around your passions and gifts. It’s going to be exciting pulling the information together and coming up with some interactive exercises to get participants involved. This topic is one of my great passions and has been for about three years.

My other partner was eager to do a presentation on building true community and connection in groups. Another one of my great passions! It prompted me to buy Scott Peck’s The Different Drum: Community Making and Peace all over again. I read it first many years ago but wound up giving it away and not replacing it. It’s helped me remember that I had plans for a career built around bringing people into genuine, cooperative community while I was working as a therapist. It’s also helping me remember that for a time I was very energized by books from people who brought together psychology or psychiatry, philosophy, and spirituality to inspire and transform people.

Man, it’s frustrating! I spent a lot of time doing thought exercises and thinking about my interests in childhood and young adulthood to reconnect to what I really want to do in my life—and now I remember I was thinking about this same path a few years ago! I didn’t have the idea of coaching people back then. I could only see the path the authors of books had taken—have a lengthy career as a therapist, then write inspirational and wise books based in those experiences. I didn’t have the foundation to think I could pursue that career and be successful at that point in my life.

Now I’m back to pursuing those goals but in ways that are more comfortable and natural to me. It’s a little strange—I had therapists as role models who transformed themselves into inspirational writers and speakers on life transformation above and beyond emotional healing. I thought I had to follow them through the therapy path until I had “earned” enough wisdom and clout. Now I see I want to teach and inspire and mentor people on personal growth, and I don’t want it to flow from or be based on being a therapist. I had to let go of being a therapist and find a different identity more aligned with my gifts and my calling. Now the new identity and the old vision are going to intersect. Wow!

The v-groups will each be a one-hour telecourse offered in October. I’ll post the information when we have them planned. The v-groups will be free but registration will be necessary. Participants will be welcomed heartily!

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

If You Want to Be It, You Must Become It

2007-08-24T09:39:00.000-07:00

I took a leap this past week, and anyone reading this post shortly after it goes up will know what I mean. I had been redirecting my ChasingWisdom.com URL to this blog. I decided to purchase hosting for the site and upload WordPress so I can use it to start building an e-zine. Right now, there’s nothing there but a post telling people to find my blog here. By September, I hope to be putting up an informative post from time to time. Click here to see how I’m doing.

Things seem to be coming together for my mentorship and coaching business. Mostly that’s because I seem to be coming together. I’m working on the text for my coaching website and I expect to have it ready to update in September. In my coaching course we’re learning about the logistics of running virtual groups by doing an exercise to develop and present a free one-hour teleclass with a partner. I’ve decided to do two different groups with two different partners—and I’m excited! I hope to be able to use the research, the writing, and the presentation experience to help me develop teleclasses I can offer for a fee in the future. I’ll certainly have the template and the experience to develop and present other topics.

I accepted a coaching challenge during practice coaching with a classmate, Sarah. She asked me on August 6 if I would commit to having my marketing message for a coaching website outlined and in rough draft form in two weeks. That was last Monday, the 20th, and I spent a lot of time working on it. I wound up pulling out old notes and ideas I’ve collected for a long time, including marketing consultant ideas I’d drafted for similar businesses, and everything I could find that I had written down over the past couple of years for marketing my therapy practice (which I ended), my consultant practice (which is on hold but not forgotten), and my coaching practice.

I have a clear vision of what I want my business, Discovery Partners, to be. I see how training and personal growth coaching fit into my model, and have an idea for a support community themed around mentorship and encouragement.

I have a good draft of the changes I will be making to my general website, www.SteveCoxsey.com, and how that will integrate with my coaching website and later my training and resources websites.

My remaining “practice” coaching client has accomplished some important goals and transitioned to maintenance for a few more weeks. This means I will be focusing some of my time on adding a few more clients and spending the rest of my time developing my virtual group presentations and finishing and editing the text for my website updates.

My current coaching course will end in November. My plan for next year is to focus on creative ideas to build my coaching practice and to take one or two courses to advance my coaching skills. A year from the end of this initial coaching course, Foundations, I expect to have a small but growing business focused on mentorship for personal growth and developing community.

To pull it all together, today I received a wonderful quote from Fast Track Your Dream:

Life isn't about finding yourself.
Life is about creating yourself.

~ George Bernard Shaw

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Homage Revisited

2007-08-17T12:36:00.000-07:00

On July 8 I posted an entry I titled “Homage.” It was a showcase of people who are in different stages of career transition and are blogging their progress. All of them were women. I wrote:

“All of these women are changing their lives and taking steps towards work that reflects their deepest, truest nature. I honor them and encourage them.

And I’m going to look EVEN HARDER for men who are doing the same.”

I met all these women through a creative career change forum through FastTrack Your Dream at Changing Course. There are many men who are FTYD members, but few post on the forum and usually just ask for information on a specific topic, get some answers, and then fade away for a while.

But I overlooked one FTYD member who has posted several helpful ideas, useful pieces of information, and words of encouragement, especially in the spring. He’s been working on his new career and so is not on the forum very often these days. I think that’s why I overlooked him in my list.

His name is Ken Robert, and he trained to become a certified Creative Career Consultant through Changing Course. He wrote a dynamic article called “Are You on the Wrong Bus?” Click on the title and you can read the article at his web site dedicated to creative career change.

Lately, Ken’s been focusing on an additional direction. Because he love’s brainstorming and creative thinking he’s developed a site called Creativity Man. The format he uses has me very interested. It’s basically a blog where he posts articles related to creativity, puzzles, and processes for organizing thoughts like mind mapping. It’s like an e-zine archive that gets regular updates.

I’m planning to find a way to utilize this format when I start “Chasing Wisdom” as an e-zine. I had thought previously about writing an article at a time and sending a teaser or an overview to my list, then sending the complete e-zine monthly. I also thought about sending one article a week to my list and then posting a complete newsletter to an archive page monthly. Now I’m thinking about using a blog format similar to Ken’s and building a monthly newsletter as I go, adding an article every few days.

One of the most appealing aspects of Ken’s format is that when you get an e-mail, it’s about one article only, his latest blog post. Instead of scanning through 3 or 4 titles and finding time to read them all, you just have one entry to consider. With some e-zines and newsletters I skip parts if I don’t feel I have time to read it all, saving it in my inbox for a few days before losing track or deleting it. With Ken’s newsletter there is less time required to read one article so I’m more likely to read each one.

I encourage you to check out Creativity Man and sign up for the articles. You’ll get a feel for the rhythm (regular but not at regimented intervals) and the chance to see how easy it is to ready a lower-demand format—one article at a time.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Changes Are Coming—Will I Be Ready?

2007-08-10T17:50:00.000-07:00

Thursday I was at a meeting for The Parenting Center in Fort Worth. I’ve just joined the Client Services Committee and I’m slowly learning the details of what the organization accomplishes as different programs are reviewed at each meeting. Lots of information was shared, but I was having a hard time concentrating because I walked in the door almost late from driving around trying to find a parking space.

A huge piece of construction equipment was blocking most of one parking lot. It was like an oversized forklift and cherry picker combined. I walked in the door and was overpowered by the smell of glue, maybe epoxy. A new air conditioning system was being installed. Bangs and clangs interrupted our conversations at times, and the glue smell followed anyone in the door who came to give a report. Change is sometimes noisy and messy even though it’s necessary.

That evening driving home I passed what used to be a couple of older homes and open pasture land. It’s been graded and partly paved for a while and a lot of work has been going on with a bridge and two ponds. One house has been built and landscaped very quickly, taking just a couple of days. As I drove by I saw cars parked all the way around the curving road around the center pond and rows of people headed to the house. It was apparently a grand opening for the housing addition, which will have a total of 20 houses within a year or two. They’re building a stone and wrought iron fence around the property, which is the very odd but consistent choice of people who say they love this town because of the “open feel of the land.” Sometimes change is the loss of the old and the comfortable and rightly brings skepticism of the new.

Today coming back from lunch at my favorite Vietnamese restaurant I drove by a church that looked like a tornado had hit. Then I saw the sign and realized the sanctuary was left intact on purpose and the office and classroom building attached to it looked blown apart because it is being demolished for renovation and expansion. Sometimes change is ugly and disruptive and needs a lot of hope and vision to make it tolerable.

Change is coming here. I started this blog in January accepting Barbara Sher’s challenge to her newsletter subscribers to keep a record of the career change steps we are taking and put it out for others to see. I used the name Chasing Wisdom which I had already chosen as the name of a newsletter or e-zine. I knew a time would come when I needed to start building my archive of articles and creating the Chasing Wisdom newsletter/e-zine, and I knew that would mean having an additional writing project and separating the blog from the newsletter.

I’m pretty sure that time is coming. I will continue to post my weekly update of my progress and plans here, mostly to keep myself accountable and moving forward, and also to share my journey with other people who are thinking about career change. When I have the newsletter ready to launch, I will keep a link to this blog on that site.

That means some day hopefully soon, when you click on www.ChasingWisdom.com you will go to the site for the newsletter. When I get closer to ready (and have more certainty and courage) I will set a date for that change and let you know.

One small but significant change I made already. Last week I closed my post with my mission statement. I kept coming back to it over the week and decided to revise it to be clearer:

To be a catalyst for personal growth and development through genuine relationships that expand to create welcoming and supportive communites

May You Know the Joys of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Little Steps in the Hero’s Journey

2007-08-03T12:28:00.000-07:00

I’m a difficult coaching client. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’m a pain in the butt. Fortunately for the coaches, right now I rotate every couple of weeks as we do coaching exercises in my class through MentorCoach.

I don’t get stuck on the “how to” part. I can help anyone breakdown a goal into small steps that are easy to accomplish—one of the reasons I really enjoying coaching others. For myself, I get stuck on the “what to,” which usually boils down to “why to.” Or more fluidly: “To what end?”

It’s the underlying philosophy, the ideology, that I keep returning to with these questions. I think about starting a free-subscription newsletter with articles on personal growth and goal achievement. I know “how to.” But I stop and think, “Why would I start that now? What will it accomplish? How does it serve my ultimate mission and purpose? To what end?”

Thank goodness I’m making progress in building a philosophical foundation. And thank goodness I started reading Deep Change by Robert E. Quinn.

The book is about coaching leaders on the idea that greatly transforming the business or organization requires personal transformation of the leaders. Quinn brings in Joseph Campbell’s writings on the Hero’s journey, which flow in part from Carl Jung’s study of the archetypes of mythology, one of my favorite “mind candies.”

Quinn uses the Hero’s journey as a template for personal growth, not just radical transformation through developmental stages. In his model, whenever a person has to test his or her abilities and tackle new challenges, some self-discovery occurs and understanding of the self changes with increased abilities.

Previously I had used the Hero’s journey as a myth for great change—including leaving the familiar world for the unfamiliar, the idea of the new land as undiscovered parts of the self and the collective unconscious (I’m a bit of a psychology nerd so that’s delightful to me), and the idea of the cave or lair of the “enemy” as a place of shadow where one learns one’s power and abilities and gains new understanding that frees and empowers.

I just hadn’t scaled the Hero’s journey down to a point where it is a mythological template for the kind of incremental personal growth people experience more often than once or twice in a lifetime.

This idea bridges a gap for me. Before I would struggle with ideas like, If a coaching client needs help organizing a goal into steps and overcoming some fear or worry in order to take action, how does that relate to deeper personal growth? Deeper personal growth is a more important mission to me than accomplishing tasks.

Quinn’s model shows me how. Learning skills of goal-setting and time management ARE quest objects for some people. Facing a fear or worry, like the fear of failure or of success or worrying that focusing on one goal will be consuming and mean the loss of other goals, has elements of a heroic quest. Taking steps towards goals that seem a little out of reach extend a person’s understanding of the self. Accomplishing things that always seemed difficult before, and learning the way to do that with future goals, is transformative, although in a smaller way.

I understand now that being coached through one goal or series of actions may not be as big as a villain-vanquishing journey to the underworld with a “dark night of the soul” and complete transformation in understanding of the self, but it’s easily an important task along the way.

My work with coaching clients will usually be helping with a smaller quest that prepares for a Great Quest down the road. Some of the quests will be straightforward and simple at the time, but will help a client learn something that may be applied to a future quest in a hugely transformative way. It may even be one of the pieces of information that help the client be successful with the Great Quest.

In great tales of the Hero’s journey, the Hero (male or female) gathers helpers for portions of the journey and learns skills, adds understanding, picks up useful tools or weapons (connecting with the collective unconscious), and grows the self until the idea of facing the Villain has changed from outrageous and impossible to necessary but overwhelming. The Hero has grown to the point of being prepared for the Showdown of the Great Quest, but the Showdown itself is the ultimate transformation, requiring the Hero to use all of his or her skills, learning, and wisdom (secret learning, special weapons, and ancient lore) to come up with a way to victory.

Often the way to victory requires that the Hero combine all the prior accomplishments and discoveries in one great moment of realization of humility and submission. The Hero understands that transcendant needs matter more than personal goals and is willing to give up the personal for the communal, the temporal for the eternal. In so choosing the Hero discovers the weakness of the Villain, who is the embodiment of elevating personal goals and wants at the expense of the needs of others.

If I help my client gather one piece of “ancient lore” that helps make sense of challenges, one bit of understanding that leads to the discovery of a “magical weapon” the client carries with the blessing of a community, or one set of skills that make the Great Quest seem just a little less impossible, my work will tie in with my mission:

To be a catalyst for personal growth and development through genuine relationships in welcoming and supportive communites

May You Know the Joys of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Deathly Hallows Quest Successful; Mowing Accomplished; On with My Mission!

2007-07-27T22:42:00.000-07:00

I stood in line for about 20 minutes at a grocery store to get the new Harry Potter book last Friday midnight, and people were on their cell phones with friends in lines at Barnes & Noble and Wal-Mart hearing about much longer waits. It only set my mowing back one day—I was done by 10:30 pm on Saturday, slept late on Sunday, and got back on track mowing. Distractions resolved (and horcruxes revealed), I focus again on my new business.

I've discovered something important during coaching homework assignments with a couple of classmates. For the lasts three weeks, our class has specifically been asked to focus our practice sessions with classmates on our progress at setting up a coaching practice.

I was working with Dee, a classmate, when I realized that I wanted to pick one thing, individual coaching, from my many ideas for a possible business and focus on it. However, my next session with Dee I realized I was resisting and starting to feel “trapped” by the idea of having a set number of coaching clients and coaching sessions each week. Dee helped me understand that I want a more open structure so I can give clients more time when they need it and less when that’s enough, without parsing the minutes. Her coaching prompted me to think in terms of how much time I wanted to set aside for a coaching practice, and how much of that time would be for things like a group call for community support, time for additional brief follow-up calls and e-mail, and managing an online forum.

So I thought I was making some headway when I started talking with Sarah. The assignment for her as my coach was to help move me forward in setting short-term goals. I wound up completely lost again.

I keep returning to a different kind of vision for the service I want to provide. It’s not a straightforward coaching practice, where someone can buy a certain amount of my time for a set fee (4 sessions a month for 30 minutes each). It’s a broader view that provides information and comfortably paced conversation (maybe virtually, such as through e-mail and forums) for people who are starting to look at ways to bring personal growth and meaningful community into their own lives. It’s a view that includes providing information through books or training sessions. It’s a view that includes individual and group coaching for people who are ready to commit some time and effort to planning and implementing changes. And it’s a view of an ongoing community for people who have been through some targeted changes but still want company and connection as they continue to grow and learn things at a slower pace.

Here’s where it gets pretty silly, and humbling to admit. I set a goal to build my individual coaching practice and then felt like that would trap me—because it seemed like I would be abandoning all my other plans. Pretty goofy, isn’t it? But that’s the way reactions tend to be when they’re preconscious, or unconscious. They aren’t logical. They just point to our deeper values in a protective way.

Talking with Sarah, I realized two things: 1) I don’t have to choose one thing to commit to right now, to the exclusion of others, so I can give time and energy to adding coaching clients without “forsaking” my other plans; and 2) focusing on one thing felt like leaving behind the other things, like I was choosing “either/or.” It wasn’t rational and it wasn’t correct, but it was what my unconscious mind was thinking. And that was holding me back from committing to it.

As long as I remember to give some time each week to considering and planning those other goals, I feel free to focus time and energy on adding coaching clients. I’ve also realized that I’ll still have the freedom to plan my time, even if I have a few coaching clients. If I discover something about the idea of teaching or building a support community that grabs my attention and calls for my time, I can transition more time to it by not adding new coaching clients. As a client reaches his or her goals and moves on, I can allot that time to developing the other ideas. I can keep adding time to working on the other goals instead of adding new coaching clients for as long as I need to, eventually focusing all my time if I decide to. And I can add more coaching clients again after I develop those other ideas.

Thank you, Dee, for helping me realize I don’t have to format my practice in a traditional way. Dee told me, “Ironically, if you want to get out of the box, just build your own. And paint it however you want to.” She helped me embrace a vision that will serve more people at different levels of need.

And thank you, Sarah, for helping me see that my resistance to a traditionally formatted coaching practice comes from my sense that I don’t want my service to be narrowly defined and time-limited. I want ongoing and recurring interactions with people at different stages of change. I want to be able to follow them through focused episodes of bigger change, and also through the slow, deliberative, thoughtful transformations of spirit that occur when dynamic communities of people welcome and nurture each other.

May You Know the Joys of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Mowing the Hours Away Until The Deathly Hallows

2007-07-20T21:14:00.000-07:00

We live on a parcel of land in what once was rural countryside. Slowly suburbia creeps closer, and occasionally sends out runners like an aggressive vine, adding a cluster of mini mansions crammed so closely there’s no sunlight for grass to grow in between. There’s plenty of “green space” around the perimeter of the cluster of houses, and often an ornamental pond or two with concrete walkways twisting so much they look like they were poured by drunken men chasing each other. Usually they throw a stone wall around the “subdivision” to set it apart and give it the feeling of exclusivity. It’s odd to hear people say they want to move to this area because of the open feel of the land, and then build stone walls to block it off.

But we have open land! Open land means trees here and there, a pond to the north and a pond to the south, and cows to the west. Open land also means a lot of mowing. I have a zero radius mower to mow my parcel. Taking out the areas we leave wild and the pond, I probably mow about 4 acres. Here in Texas we had a lengthy drought followed by months of ongoing rains, so mowing has been tricky. I was able to get everything adequately mowed between rainfalls so I could take my mower in for its annual service. It took more than a week and the rains have been intermittent since I got it back. That means that the area outside our fenced yard is very tall, so parts of the grass rise above my knees when I drive the mower through.

Because of this I had to plan 2 levels of mowing. I cut with the mower set very high to shear off the top part of the grass, still leaving it lengthy and rough looking. I will have to go back over it at a lower setting to get a nice clean cut. If the rain holds off. I got a cool breeze and then a chilly wind with sprinkles of rain from some very dark clouds while I was making my first run through half the pasture.

Having to mow, and then mow again, seemed frustrating at first. But when I thought it through it sounded a lot like my career path lately. I have to take steps of preparation in order to take the next steps for the next level of preparation. I can’t just walk through a door and have a thriving coaching/personal growth counseling practice. I have to complete the coursework, I have to have a couple of practice clients, and then I have to build up a paying clientele one client at a time.

It’s the same with the mowing. I can’t just set the mower on “nice low even cut” and zip around for a few hours and be done. I have to mow the wild pasture down to a manageable level. Then I have to wait a few days and mow it at a lower level, which will leave clumps of cut grass that will turn brown and ugly. Then I have to wait until the grass has grown back a little and mow it evenly to get everything to look right.

Mowing has to be done on a regular basis. Around here, that’s from some time in March until maybe October or November. Then there’s a break. But when the grass starts growing again, I have to try to stay on schedule or it gets out of hand and grows taller than my knees. Sometimes the schedule gets messed up because of rain. Sometimes the schedule gets messed up because I’m out of town for a while. But usually the schedule with the mower gets messed up because I forget to respect the regular cycle of the grass when I get busy doing other things. I’ll miss my regular time to mow and look out a couple of days later and realize I need to get it done soon. And then I’ll start trying to figure out when, in my crowded schedule, I can get to it without waiting until my next regular mowing time.

Grass doesn’t reschedule. It doesn’t agree to postpone the project because things came up. It doesn’t wait for a time that’s convenient for both of us. It just grows when it’s supposed to grow and really doesn’t care if I stay caught up!

My pasture teaches me lots of lessons when I’m willing to pay attention. Some of them I even remember! This one I’m slow to act on, though. The new Harry Potter book comes out tonight and I’m heading to Kroger or Wal-Mart to buy it. The back half of the pasture may wind up as tall as my shoulders before I take time to do the first rough cut. Maybe I’ll finish the book over the weekend and find a couple of hours on Monday to go out and learn some more things from my pasture.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Time to Focus

2007-07-16T21:52:00.000-07:00

I’ve had a lot of ideas brainflooding me in the past few weeks about ways to incorporate e-books, seminars, videos, audios, group coaching, individual coaching, and a membership site for online community and support in my business model.

It’s freakin’ me out!

I have a large vision of where I can eventually take my business and how I can have multiple profit centers and a lot of variety in my work but stay focused on the themes of community building, mentorship, and advocating personal growth.

It’s such a big vision it has stunned me, like a deer in the headlights.

I procrastinated writing this blog entry because I felt completely adrift, not knowing what to do next.

Which is a pretty sad thing, since coaching, more than anything else, is about finding direction and taking practical steps. But I was lost!

I never quite understand the nuances of the saying, “he couldn’t see the forest for the trees.” But I think it means the overwhelming details are blinding you to the big picture. Well, I got that reversed. I couldn’t see the trees for the forest.

My next step is to build my coaching practice. I don’t have to build a web site yet that includes products and seminars and a membership site. I just need something focused on helping potential clients get to know me.

The other things I can add in the future, but my focus now is on telling people I have a coaching practice and learning about getting referrals.

I love working with people exploring their calling. I love working with creative people. I love working with people who want to mentor and guide others. The message has to get a little more focused and specific to be useful in helping people learn how I can help them.

So that’s my goal: focus the message and start letting people know I have slots available for coaching clients. Until I get to a steady level (I have no idea how many that will be yet) I won’t worry about classes or group coaching or e-books. One purpose, until it’s established and fairly consistent. One goal. One focus.

It’s time to act.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Homage

2007-07-08T09:39:00.000-07:00

When you look to the left at the top of my blog page you see “Blogs from Friends Custom Designing Their Own Lives.” I included those a while back because they reflect the purpose of this blog when I started it: to track my journey to meaningful and enjoyable work and the discoveries along the way.

Today I want to celebrate these people and encourage everyone to click the links and see their blogs.

Arts, Tiles, and Mosaics is a blog by RMW about her zealous, joyful passion for painted tiles. She loves making them, she loves teaching about making them, and she loves studying ancient tiles. She’s trying to shift her life a little bit so tiles can be a bigger part, incorporated in her work and not just something for free time. See her work and you will know she can do it.

Della’s New Look Designs is by Della P. She has a knack for home staging, organizing, and decorating but is just beginning to explore those options. The excitement on her blog is she has discovered gifts and passions by doing volunteer work with a special youth ministry through her church and it is giving her confidence and joy. She is changing and growing, not sure where she will end up, but thrilled to be moving forward.

New Moon Angel’s blog is by Armelle, a French woman who until recently lived and worked in Ireland. She left that position to pursue more creative work and moved back to France as part of her journey. But she returned in time to join a pilgrimage walking through Spain and just spent about a month doing that. She is a writer by nature and looking for ways to include that in her new life. Her blog is full of the richness of her craft and amazing discoveries she has made by having the courage to make changes and take risks.

Rambling and Writing is by Stella, who loves to head out on weekends and drive the back roads and discover places. She is thinking of ways to use her unique perspective on discovering places to incorporate into weekend travel recommendations. Stella helped me realize that my own road will be twisty and uncertain sometimes, but the discovery of the new town can be more exciting than rushing straight for a distant goal and missing the journey along the way.

Storytellers and Writers is by Jane VerDow. She is author of Dear Daisy and started a small publishing company. Her prose is lyrical and she also puts poetry on her blog at times. She has a great deal of wisdom and insight and shares her own journey in a courageous and transparent way.

Travel with the Kids is a happy idea by Travel Cat (Catherine). Cat is using her blog to practice putting together great ideas for weekend outings or sites to see in different towns for people traveling with children. She includes reviews of places showing how children will experience and enjoy them and usually has price and contact information. This is a window on the development of a creative business idea, since in the future she may have a published guide or on-line resource with many listings. It’s fun to see the process of building up lots of information by writing one piece at a time.

Wendy V’s Ponderings is from Wendy, who recently moved from St. Paul, Minnesota to Nashville, Tennessee. She is a fan and advocate of musicians and has made guiding and coaching new musicians part of her career. She moved to Nashville to be closer to the music and the musicians. It’s a bumpy ride! She has taken a risk and made a big move. She is having new experience and learning a lot, but also struggling with learning a new place and getting a steady survival income. Hers is a story of courage and dedication to a passion.

What if you believe? is a blog from Kamin Bell, who works as a life coach while maintaining a demanding corporate job. She records her insights and philosophy here. It’s inspirational and spiritual, giving good balance to anyone with a life full of errands and tasks and corporate guidelines.

All of these women are changing their lives and taking steps towards work that reflects their deepest, truest nature. I honor them and encourage them.

And I’m going to look EVEN HARDER for men who are doing the same.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Independence

2007-06-26T09:59:00.000-07:00

I’ve been blogging weekly since I started “Chasing Wisdom” a few months back. This is my first time to miss my weekly deadline, but it was planned. I will be out of town over the 4th of July week so I decided to put this post in the middle of a 3-week span and another at the end when I get back.

The Independence Day theme is transformative for aspiring entrepreneurs and self-bossers. Our nation was founded on the basis of personal liberty of thought and expression, ending formalized categories of class, and market freedom through capitalism. Until the late 19th to early 20th century, nearly every person in the United States was self-employed or a small business owner. That included farmers, craftsmen, and small-scale merchants.

When I hear talks about employees transitioning to self-employment and business ownership, the reasons I hear resonate with all the great lessons I learned as a child about the ideals and values of this country: freedom of expression, the liberty to choose our own paths and design our futures, freedom to participate in the economy and take responsibility for our own income and wealth, and the freedom to learn and try new things unbound by class.

Some of you may be surprised that these were some of the lessons I learned about my country, since there are so many negative messages about the history of the nation and a focus on mistakes and flaws taught in public school today. I went to school in rural Oklahoma and suburban Texas, so that might explain why I learned the good stuff.

I also learned about the flaws, especially the fact that it’s taken centuries to get closer to allowing all the freedoms of the United States to all citizens of any race, color, or creed. I learned about the wars against Native Americans and a string of broken promises.

But I believed these were flaws of people, not flaws of the design. The values and principles of American liberty transform people and transform society over time, generally expanding freedom in spite of the ups and downs at particular points in history.

Independence was initially won to have freedom from a social class system and a closed economic system where most people were at the mercy of the nobility and a few wealthy merchants. Today the typical message about work is, “Get a good job at a big company and work your way up.” That message says put yourself at the mercy of a new nobility, corporations, who are also the wealthiest of the merchants. We’re running from the freedoms gained.

The message of self-employment, self-bossing, small business, and multiple income streams flies in the face of that message. It says, “Reclaim your independence! Take the liberty that is within your grasp! Exercise your freedom!”

What a way to celebrate and honor the spirit of independence in America.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

The Highwire Excitement of…Teleseminars!

2007-06-15T14:36:00.000-07:00

Barbara Sher is one of my favorite virtual mentors. I got an e-mail notice the other day that she was doing some more teleseminars on “Resistance.” She’s been doing a few on that topic on a voluntary basis. The money paid benefits either her Kilim Women Project or the Coming Home Animal Sanctuary. Me, I’ve got resistance! And I like helping a good cause, so I signed up for this past Thursday’s call.

One of the participants must have been calling from The Twilight Zone. Barbara said at one point it was the noisiest teleseminar she’d ever been on. We had crying babies and screaming kids, off and on. We had a rhythmic grating like someone washing dishes, or sanding something, or sharpening a tool (Yikes!). We had people coughing or clearing their throat LOUDLY into the phone. We even heard “You’ve got mail” from someone’s computer.

Three people had volunteered to work with Barbara on the call. The volunteer would present the situation related to changing work or moving towards a new career or advancing their business, and Barbara would help them see the next steps and figure out what was keeping them from moving forward. It was a lot like coaching. Each participant got some great ideas. But none of them was struggling with the specific kind of resistance Barbara teaches about. When you resist making sales call because it’s not your personality, that’s understandable. When you resist balancing your checkbook because it’s taxing and boring, that’s normal. When you love to paint and you finally have time and a studio set up, but you wind up dusting the bookshelves instead of painting—that’s resistance. And, as a person who’s tried dusting bookshelves, I can say it’s just not normal, either!

After the call Barbara invited us to her public discussion groups at her web site. It was interesting that many people who have read her books and understand her concepts could list all the tips and ideas and techniques she had suggested during the discussion. Others, newer to the ideas or with minds organized in a different way, hadn’t caught on to all that was shared and were amazed when they realized all that was covered in the call. Even though none of the participants was actually talking about the kind of resistance that involves avoiding what you really want to be doing, she taught a lot of techniques for overcoming obstacles. She did her part and did it really well, but with all the interruptions and distractions and confused expectations, I’m sure it was a challenging experience.

There was a teleseminar a couple of weeks back that I heard as a member of Fast Track Your Dream, a career change support community. There was a glitch with recording the call so some of us had a “re-enactment” call to share our notes and memories of the examples and recommendations. Fast Track creator Valerie Young came up with a couple of extra recordings for us to download, so we wound up with much more information than recording the call alone would have given us. But, boy, was she in a tough spot trying to find ways to provide that information after the recording process fell apart.

It’s gotten me to think that there can be high drama in offering teleseminars. I had thought I could learn the simple technical aspects, put together some interesting content, and have a low-risk way to offer information for a fee. Before these calls, my biggest worry was remembering to be on my own teleseminar. I’ve already missed one I signed up for because I forgot what day it was on. Fortunately, there was a nice recording waiting for me to download to my iPod afterwards. I’ve already heard that call and can listen to it again. But if I forgot to call in for my own teleseminar, I don’t think I’d be as excited to listen to what people recorded for me to hear afterwards!

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

So, What Am I Doing Now?

2007-06-08T10:09:00.000-07:00

I started this blog in January when Barbara Sher challenged her e-mail list to start taking steps towards career change, make a public declaration, and keep people updated by using a blog. She helps people at all stages of career change, trying to find what it is you want to do, learning how to make a career out of a passion, getting training, education, or work experience to help decide, and figuring out the steps to leave a stable job slowly without causing financial crisis.

I had already decided my trial year of therapy with foster kids wasn’t for me and I was wrapping up that practice. I knew I wanted to do positive counseling and thought coaching sounded pretty much like that to me. I knew I wanted to work with people in life transitions, especially looking for enjoyable and meaningful work, and with people who want to improve their skills working with children, including parents and teachers and caregivers.

So now I’m starting my sixth month of actively changing to a new career. Seems like I should be pretty much done by now but I’m not there yet.

I signed up for the coaching training through MentorCoach and have enjoyed discovering that, so far, coaching IS mostly positive counseling with a few important differences. I set up 2 practice clients early on, but am only able to work regularly with one because of schedule complications and other inconsistencies in my practice client’s life. Hey, maybe if we had worked together more than once I could have helped him overcome those obstacles!

I’ve been volunteering time working as a consultant with a minister of a smaller church who sees growth but wants to keep his church moving forward. We have focused on building stronger relationships among the congregants and how to develop community groups they will attend and enjoy. I developed a survey which we sent out and we’ve gotten 20-something responses so far. Consultation has involved offering information, brainstorming, and surveying others for their input, and I’ve learned I like doing those things to balance out the one-sided nature of coaching.

I learned, thanks to self-discovery exercises from Barbara Sher and from Valerie Young, that I enjoy community, the feeling of connection and belonging among people in groups. I love mentorship, which I define as a dynamic relationship with a person or group of people for the purpose of guiding the process of personal growth and development through self-discovery and shared knowledge, wisdom, and experience. I get jazzed by the idea of helping people develop mentorship skills to build connection and belonging in different kinds of groups and to bring unconnected and lonely people into thriving communities.

I know how to use QuickBooks. I’m ready to start getting paid and tracking those accounts—almost. I have a PayPal account but I don’t know how to process a credit card payment yet. I’m eager to get to the point where I need to learn.

I realized from the guidance and comments of coaches and others learning about coaching that I need to focus initial marketing on my community instead of a broad internet audience. I was stuck for a while wondering how I could come up with enough interesting material to be able to put out a monthly newsletter that would get people to sign up. And I was stuck wondering how to convert the newsletter list to a few paying clients. Now I see that’s a little bit down the road and my first focus should be on introducing myself to people in my community who might need coaching services or know people who do. Most importantly, I realized that speaking in front of groups is probably a good way to get a few initial referrals, and that although I complain that I don’t want to speak to groups I actually feel comfortable doing it. It’s the preparation where I’m worrying about what to say that’s the hard part.

This twisty road is still twisty, but I have many more suggestions about places to visit in my journey. I can’t head straight for any of them because I’m not sure of the route, but eventually I get there, and I find many more interesting places along the way.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

The Lessons of Teams

2007-06-01T10:05:00.000-07:00

I’m pretty sure it’s considered “common knowledge” that involving children in team activities is a good thing. It’s supposed to help them prepare for adult life where they have to get along with groups of people and work as teams.

In the idealized version, kids will have the chance to learn how to deal with different kinds of people and their personalities. They will have an adult outside their families (usually) who helps train them and guide them, being a role model and mentor (remember this is the idealized version). They will learn to count on other people some of the time, and they will learn other people are counting on them. If they don’t do their part, the whole team or group will struggle. They will learn the value of being part of something greater than themselves.

All that CAN happen, but it’s pretty rare. Fortunately, even with a pretty pathetic experience as part of a group or team, our kids learn a lot about dealing with other people. They can get some of the idealized lessons on struggling teams, and they can get some of the harsher lessons on high performing teams.

As you read my list of other lessons, be forewarned this is not a feel-good entry. Some of these lessons are a little harsh. I’m not all smiles and hugs. That’s not my nature. I’m a skeptic and a cynic and a pragmatist about human interactions, good and bad.

When push comes to shove, when it’s their own child who is struggling, parents will give up the idealized values of learning to perform for a team and being accountable for doing your part. They will see high expectations as threatening to the self-esteem and emotional comfort of their own children, although they are widely proven to produce higher performance.

Most people value excuses over valid feedback. They hear a specific critique of a choice they made or the quality of their performance as personal criticism. Teammates who think they might also be critiqued in the same way are likely to defend a person receiving critique and find fault in the coach or team leader for offering the critique. Friends and parents of the person receiving the critique are likely to find fault in the person offering the critique, thinking they are protecting the player’s feelings.

Most people scapegoat one or a few people to avoid seeing personal responsibility. When there’s a breakaway play caused by poor strategy or sloppy team performance, the guy left alone trying to stop the score often gets the blame. With presentations, the speaker can get the blame when things don’t go well, even though it was poor visuals or a lack of good information due to other team members’ incompetence.

Most people oversimplify success and celebrate the one who scores. In team sports it’s very hard for one person to make a scoring play happen without relying on the work of teammates. The person who reads the field or the court best may move in a way to open up lanes for other players, or might get the ball to the scoring player after lots of effort. The one who scores usually gets the cheers.

It’s human nature to find strong players and focus on them instead of developing the entire team. It’s hard work to see the abilities and potential of someone who is new to a job or a sport, and it’s even harder to walk them step-by-step to becoming a good player. It’s easy to get comfortable and keep using what works.

Teams that rely on strong players without developing the others can’t keep performing long-term. Relying on a few strong players can win a lot of games, but big games and championships drain the players. The team with more well-prepared and talented players is much more likely to survive the energy drain by spreading around the hard work.

Adults that can teach our children valuable skills aren’t all role models or mentors. Usually people who teach a sport or hobby or skill are passionate first about the activity. If they are teaching, they might also enjoy working with people and seeing them learn and grow. But a lot of them just enjoy finding other people who share their interest in the activity and don’t concern themselves with the whole person. That’s okay. Our kids get to learn the difference between finding someone who is great at helping them learn a skill and intentionally choosing someone to be a mentor or role model.

Most leaders (including coaches) have very specific qualities and abilities they look for, so their evaluations of the same person can be very different. The lesson of receiving critique is very important. Critique should not be shunned because it’s harsh. It shouldn’t be completely embraced because it comes from someone with expertise. It should be thoughtfully and honestly considered and compared to what other people of similar expertise have to say. A player who is valued for his speed by two coaches and criticized for being too slow by the new coach has probably not really lost his speed. The new coach may not be specific enough describing what he wants to see, or he may just be seeing a narrow window and not the big picture.

Most leaders have one or a few team members they target for criticism, out of proportion to the way they respond to the rest of their team. This is mostly hard on the targeted players. Sometimes it leads to the whole team scapegoating the criticized players. That is most likely when the coach or leader is unfairly biased against the players and doesn’t see a balanced picture of their performance. Sometimes a coach is particularly harsh on a player because he sees enormous potential and is pushing hard, or because he thinks other people in the player’s life are soft on him and he’s held back by low expectations. The leader is trying to compensate for this in order to help the player long-term. This targeted player isn’t likely to be a team scapegoat. But he is likely to get frustrated and discouraged if he doesn’t talk to the leader and learn about the leader’s strong commitment and high expectations.

Most leaders have one or a few team members they favor and whose flaws they struggle to see. This is hard for the team members who aren’t favored, but it’s actually dangerous for the ones who ARE favored. A leader who provides predictably consistent feedback to a group but seems to give a pass to a couple of people causes resentment and hard feelings against the favored players and himself. That can undermine team spirit if the members don’t recognize this normal human shortcoming. The favored players won’t be getting much useful feedback and the expectations will be lower, so their performance will slip over time. They won’t be ready to do well on a different team. They won’t be ready to stand on their own.

One person can lift an entire group’s performance through personal effort, commitment and determination (I’m not ALL cynical). I don’t know if this is a gift everyone can cultivate or if it’s something only a few people can do. Motivation is a huge determining factor in sports, and it carries over to team performance in other areas. When one player suddenly starts playing with a burst of energy, shows a lot of focus and effort, and encourages teammates to improve their performance, a shift can occur. Suddenly execution is quicker and crisper and confidence is evident. A team can start to dominate and look unbeatable playing with intensity that starts from one player’s burst of enthusiasm.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

What Does “Age Appropriate” Really Mean?

2007-05-25T22:05:00.000-07:00

I was listening to a report on the radio a few days ago and the commentator, trying to explain some trend among college students, referred to their “age appropriate” sense of invincibility and difficulty delaying gratification. Now it’s true in general that adolescents don’t judge risk well and think they’re more capable than they really are, and it’s true in general that delaying gratification is a sign of developing maturity. But it struck me as odd that a journalist would expect young adults well past physical adolescence to act like children.

This is a trend that is growing and spreading, destroying reason in its path. Decades ago adults were likely to expect young children to exhibit more consideration and self-control than we now know their brains and bodies are capable of showing. They expected polite manners in restaurants and children only speaking to adults when addressed by them. High school juniors and seniors were treated as young adults about to be working and caring for themselves.

Today people bring their toddlers to adult movies and keep them in the theater, even when they’re screaming and shrieking. They don’t get up and leave the theater, respecting the rights of the dozens of other people who bought tickets. They move to the end of the aisle or maybe a little closer to the door, but they stay in the theater watching the movie. Tantrums are “age appropriate” so somehow that means all of society is supposed to endure them.

What happened to reason? It is age appropriate for a two-year-old to throw a fit to get his way sometimes, or just to do it because he’s frustrated or overwhelmed. But that doesn’t mean parents shouldn’t remove the child form a situation he is disrupting, or that they should tolerate being hit and screamed at.

Parents let their young kids run wild in restaurants, at church, and at school activities. They climb on things that aren’t for climbing and chase each other around, bumping into people and sometimes causing big messes. Restlessness and recklessness are “age appropriate” so parents don’t try to prevent the collisions and messes. They don’t step in until things fall apart, but only if they notice.

Wanting to be wild and silly is age appropriate for young children, but that doesn’t mean it’s always the time and place for it. Remember indoor voices and outdoor voices? Remember indoor games and outdoor games? Our parents understood the distinction and the reason. What’s happened to parents?

Wanting to spend every waking moment with friends is considered “age appropriate” for children starting at some age, which seems to drop lower each year, and now seems to be hovering around nine or ten. It’s true that social belonging is a genuine developmental need, which peaks in late adolescence and early adulthood. It’s connected to belonging to groups and establishing an identity, and to finding a romantic partner. However, it’s absolutely NOT age appropriate, healthy, or necessary for children and young teens.

It’s age appropriate for kids to develop interests outside their family, increasingly as they grow older. But it’s not age appropriate for them to despise or shun their parents—EVER! That’s a recent phenomenon in American culture and to a lesser degree in other Western countries. But it’s uncommon in most cultures today and was uncommon in our culture decades ago.

Our children’s security and stability, long-term identity, and deepest support come from family, especially dedicated parents. Replacing that with the whimsical acceptance and demands of peers who are children themselves robs our kids’ lives of that centered, grounded certainty they need to get through difficult challenges.

Wanting to experiment with alcohol is considered “age appropriate” for teenagers, so regardless of what the law says some parents expect and tolerate a certain amount of underage drinking. Some even provide the alcohol for their teens as long as they stay home while drinking! Some parents believe the way to respond to adolescents’ developing sexuality is to talk about “safe sex” and make sure condoms are available. Since the desires and feelings are “age appropriate,” they assume the behavior is, too.

It’s age appropriate for three-year-olds to want to eat all the ice cream in the carton. But that doesn’t mean we should let them. They want many things that aren’t healthy or good for them, like avoiding naps and refusing to go to bed when they’re tired at night. Kids at all ages will want things that aren’t good for them. Those wants and drives may be “age appropriate,” but acting on them is not.

Rude and insolent behavior in children and teens is tolerated because the pop culture says, “They’re just going through a stage,” or, “You know, it’s that age.” Understanding the feelings, the wants, and the drives of our children gets conflated with tolerating their offensive behavior.

Part of the problem, I am convinced, is a culture that idolizes adolescence. We rush to move our children into an adolescent world at younger and younger ages. Then we prolong adolescence, letting them live at home rent-free well into their twenties with no clear goals.

Another part, possibly the biggest, is our fear of saying “no.” I think many parents believe they have to allow all expressions of feelings in order to respect their children’s feelings. They don’t see the elegance of saying, “I see how very angry you are, but I’m not for hitting. Use your words.” They don’t understand how respectful and empowering it is to say to a child, “This isn’t a place for screaming. You can use a quiet voice and stay here, or you can go outside if you need to scream.”

I slip into despair sometimes watching parents struggle with their children and hearing their comments about how overwhelming it is to raise them. But I try to focus on hope, which comes from remembering parents who learned a little information and a couple of new techniques and completely changed their relationships with their children.

I want to bring that hope to people. I want to help them understand their children and their role in their children’s lives. I want to empower them to raise their children to become amazing and competent people. But I stumble over my frustration at the lack of effort and commitment I see and the growing tolerance of rude and offensive behavior. I’m too young to be so cynical. It’s not age appropriate!

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Do They Know They Need What I Have to Offer?

2007-05-18T19:29:00.000-07:00

I did a little market research on professional coaches offering services to parents and wound up overwhelmed. I know it’s typical to have some strong reactions to learning about the field you’re considering when planning for self-employment or business ownership. It involves a lot of change and a lot of risk so emotions get stirred up. But even though I knew that as an abstract idea, I was surprised by the details of my real experience.

I Googled and Yahoo’ed parenting and coaching and found a few sites. Only one site I reviewed listed a fee for coaching. It was in line with the format and fees of general life coaching I’ve heard about, but the rest wouldn’t state a fee—and I was anxious and annoyed! I’m inclined to put fees out there, so I wondered if that will somehow put me at a disadvantage. Do these other coaches have good reasons not to list fees? Is it better marketing to wait and cover them in a sales pitch? Are they ashamed or uncomfortable stating fees, or do they know about some strong research indicating it’s more effective to cover fees in person? I was stressing!

But that wasn’t the end of my anxiety. The coaches have different backgrounds. Some have bachelor’s degrees in a social science area (not psychology or human development). Some were teachers for years and use that as their experience base. Some have master’s degrees, but not in psychology or counseling or human development or education.

That should encourage me, right? I would think so! I have a master’s degree in psychology, specialty focus on child psychology and consulting in schools. I co-owned a preschool and child care center for 10 years, worked in residential treatment, worked in schools, and had a private psychotherapy practice. So why did the backgrounds of the other coaches get to me? Because maybe parents aren’t comfortable talking to someone with a mental health and therapy background about how to improve their relationships with their children and their overall parenting style—that’s why.

Then the big problem showed up. A recurring theme on the parent coaching web sites is, “We don’t tell you how to be a parent” or “We don’t have the answers” or “We don’t teach you a system—we help you develop your own system based on your values.” They state that because professional coaching is rapidly becoming helping people discover their own answers instead of training and teaching them.

My anxiety was buzzing full-speed now. It makes sense to avoid telling parents there is a single program with some number of steps and you learn the system. That’s simplistic and doesn’t allow for individual variation. But, come on, there are core facts!

You shouldn’t help an overly compulsive, worrisome mother develop her own style of intruding and controlling her children’s lives. You have to stand for the child’s need for autonomy and reasonable risk-taking because it’s developmentally necessary.

You don’t help a dad with high achievement standards and a stoic outlook develop a program for pushing for high performance in all areas that winds up ignoring his children’s emotional needs and vulnerabilities. You have to take a stand for the emotional security of the children.

You don’t help the mother who is worried about hurting her child’s feelings or causing a rift in the parent-child relationship develop a system that is permissive, with few boundaries and low expectations on the child, where the primary goal is to make sure the child approves of the mother’s choices. You take a stand for the child’s need for boundaries and expectations as a model for self-control.

My strong response to some of these aspects of other coaches’ web sites helped me reinforce some of my core values for my practice, so it was very helpful in that regard. But this experience stirred up a lot of worries that what I want to offer and what I believe in may not be the service parents are willing to pay to get. I’ve chosen this work because I know there are important things that children and adolescents need from their parents to develop compassion, empathy, self-control, morality, and strong character. I will encourage parents to learn about those things, help teach them the information, and help train them in the skills they can use to guide their children towards adulthood as capable, responsible, and fulfilled people capable of enjoying life and sharing it with others.

And as I speak about and write about what I believe, I have to trust my words will reach parents who want that future for their children and will be able to see that they need to learn certain principles and skills to help make it happen. I will coach them, as unique individuals, to help them find the specific skills and techniques for providing their children what they need. But I will always stand for the needs of the children and help parents see what they should be doing to cultivate the roots of resilience and the fruits of abundance in their children’s lives.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

A Stand Against Ruts

2007-05-11T19:31:00.000-07:00

A lot of people I talk to seem trapped.

Some are trapped on the path of what they “should” be doing with their careers. They are spending a few years at one company and trying to get a better job at another company, which will lead to a different better job at a different company—and they aren’t sure where it stops and they know they don’t even want to take the ride.

Some are in jobs they’ve had for years, where they hear lots of promises of change and better opportunities, but all they get are empty words. They hang on wondering if the words will ever come true in spite of the evidence they see every day.

Some are bored, or even worse they feel like their souls are shriveling up. They pour their productive hours into monotonous tasks without meaning and with no end in sight. They don’t think they deserve to enjoy their work.

The sad thing, but also the powerful thing, is that all these people know they have a vision to do something unique that’s bigger and more fulfilling. But they won’t pursue the vision, because of what they “should” be doing instead, or because they’re holding on to safety and security while they whither away. Worse yet, some hold on to not-quite safety and not-really security hoping what they have will become “good enough” some day.

Fear is insipid. Creative career counselor Barbara Sher likes to refer to “the Dobermans” in our minds that start barking and howling when they sense danger—even when the danger is merely changing from the boring rut to the exciting unknown of possibility. Like the guard dogs, our internal Dobermans are overly alert and greatly exaggerate the threat, but we hear the barking and think it must be really dangerous so we pull back.

Most of our “support” systems just support the status quo. Be normal, like us. Don’t excel. Don’t do unique and exciting things. Have the same kinds of jobs and take the same kinds of vacations and enjoy the same kinds of activities as the rest of us. Then it will be really easy for us all to talk to each other, because we won’t have to stretch our minds, leave our comfort zones, and think.

I stand opposed to ruts that keep people from knowing their true nature and expressing their true talents.

I stand opposed to ruts that hold people back from taking reasonable risks to try the new, the unique, and the interesting.

I stand opposed to ruts that tell people fitting in with other people’s expectations is more important than creating a life that fits just right.

I stand for creative thought, visions pursued, authentic living, and the power of expressing your true self.

I stand for hope.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Podcasting?

2007-05-04T09:37:00.000-07:00

I have this idea that podcasting might be fun.

Podcasting?

It’s an odd idea for someone with a voice like mine, which would be perfect for a mime.

Podcasting would be an avenue for teaching and explaining. It would be a way to share interviews with people about the paths to self-discovery they took and the accomplishments they achieved when they jumped out of the rut called “typical.”

It sounds like it could be a lot of fun. It will require learning some technical skills and doing things I haven’t done before.

When I was a kid my older brother took apart a radio shack tape recorder and found a way to use it as a P.A. system. We would talk into the little disc microphone and our voices would be amplified through the built-in speaker. We built a shack out of shipping crates under a tree and used it as our radio station. So, actually, this is not something I haven’t done before. I have a brief broadcast career. It just wasn’t recorded and isn’t available for download over the internet.

I have an iMac computer, which is supposed to be set up for podcasting. It has a program called “Garage Band” that can record a podcast. But I have to get very friendly with the computer screen to have my face close enough to the built-in mic to get an adequate recording.

I plugged an external mic into the iMac and tried to see how that would go. I also plugged headphones in so I could monitor how I sounded. Bad idea! Not only does it let me hear my own voice—it has a tiny delay, so I get tripped up waiting for my voice in my headphones to catch up with what I’m saying.

So far, I like how I sound best when I use the effect called “helium head” or something like that. I also like the one that makes me sound like the croaky electronic voice of Princess Leia in disguise as a bounty hunter.

I’m going to try to do this. I will sketch out some episodes with a few minutes of content each. I’ll try to add a little musical intro (that’s been a learning experience, too). I’ll find a low-cost way to get my podcasts hosted. It will help me focus on ideas I want to share and it will help me think about giving one piece of information at a time in a clear and understandable way.

And it will let me play with more of the features on my iMac! Playing is good, especially when it nearly looks like work.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Attentive Observation

2007-04-27T22:30:00.000-07:00

Scott Peck, author of The Road Less Traveled, defines love as actively seeking that which is good for another person. It’s a focus of effort, mindfulness, and emotional energy on the needs of someone else.

I believe that one of the most effective ways to do this is through attentive observation. Attentive observation means you focus your awareness on another person, watching and listening and feeling and intuiting what is going on. It means you pay attention in a way that is undeniable, because you communicate what you are observing clearly and specifically.

Adele Faber and Elaine Mazlish give great examples of the power of attentive observation in their book How to Talk So Kids Will Listen. One area is effective praise. Instead of telling a child, “Wow! That’s fantastic!” they encourage parents to say, “I see lots of blue at the top of your painting, like it’s the sky, and this red building with a chimney could be a house. I see children playing by that tree, and there are lots of birds.” It is validating and empowering to be acknowledged in such a specific and direct way.

Another way they use attentive observation is to nudge a child towards correcting a behavior or solving a problem. “I see toys spread out all over the table we’ll need for dinner in about 15 minutes,” or “I hear two brothers arguing and I see one raising a toy to throw it!” This kind of attentive description puts the focus on the situation, not the child, but says to the child, “You can figure this out and make it right.”

A third amazing way they use attentive observation is to give deep encouragement and acknowledgement of strong character traits. It’s especially useful as a counterweight to a child’s negative self-image. For the child who gets low grades on homework and sometimes doesn’t bother to turn it in, they would suggest finding a way to “catch” the child being responsible, especially with schoolwork. Then they would give the report, “You’ve been working on that homework without a break this afternoon. That’s what I call diligent!”

They would also suggest finding everyday opportunities to summarize children’s behaviors. “When you held the door open for the woman carrying those packages, you were being courteous.” For a pattern, they recommend something like, “Sara, I’ve noticed you help your brother get ready and find his things. You understand he needs help because he’s young. That shows consideration.”

Attentive observation is powerful in therapy. It can be a gentle confrontation, such as, “One of your goals is to improve your relationship with your girlfriend, but you’ve just criticized her and talked about her like you don’t respect her.” It can summarize successes, like, “That’s three weeks without blowing money on a shopping binge.”

Attentive observation is powerful in coaching. Used to summarize and challenge, it helps propel a client forward. For example, “You set three major goals to accomplish by summer. Now you say you have too much to do and you’re getting frustrated. It sounds like all or nothing. Am I understanding it correctly?” Used to encourage, as in, “Based on what you accomplished last year, I have no doubt you’re the right person to be in charge of this,” it can provide authentic inspiration.

When delivered with compassion and respect, attentive observation is therapeutic, it is healing, and it is whole-making. It is also uplifting, it is encouraging, and it is compelling. It is intentional love.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Mentorship

2007-04-20T18:45:00.000-07:00

Since I first started thinking years ago about working with people who want to add more enjoyment and fullness to their lives, I thought the best word to describe what I wanted to be was “mentor.” I’ve used that word in various ways since then, playing around with it in marketing ideas while trying to discover what I want my practice to be.

That’s why I was drawn to a brochure that came in the mail last year about a conference introducing a way that therapists can transition to coaching. It was from MentorCoach, founded by Ben Dean, Ph.D. The name told me I would find a view of coaching that was similar to how I was trying to define being a mentor. I wasn’t very articulate at explaining my concept of a personal growth and development counselor/human development consultant and trainer/positive counselor/mentor. Yes, I was that confused.

The MentorCoach view was close, but different enough that I resisted enrolling in coaching training for months because “coaching” is a box (see last week’s mini-rant). But then I started to understand coaching is a way of working with people I can add to my skill set. I saw the training as expanding instead of defining and limiting my practice. This month I began a class of basic coaching skills through MentorCoach and will be a Certified Mentor Coach upon successful completion of the course.

About two months ago I realized that the overall theme of my practice is mentorship. The role of mentor not only best defines how I will work with clients; it also describes the skills I want to help them achieve in their relationships with other people. I am defining my practice as a Mentor and Mentorship Coach.

But the word mentor is vaguely understood. Some people consider a mentor to be an unpaid older tutor or guide who is amazingly successful in the area another person wants to learn, especially in business or a career. Some people consider a mentor to be a volunteer who meets with an underprivileged child or teenager to be a role model of success and to encourage the young person to make good choices. Some people even consider a person they know only through books, interviews, and articles to be a mentor because that person has shared wisdom and experience that is helpful to the receiver.

I am developing my definition of mentor. Right now it is: a person who enters into a dynamic relationship with another person or group of people to guide the process of personal growth and development through self-discovery and shared knowledge, wisdom, and experience.

Mentorship, then, is (for now): the act of entering into a dynamic relationship with another person or group of people for the purpose of guiding the process of personal growth and development through self-discovery and shared knowledge, wisdom, and experience.

To that end, I have named my practice “Discovery Partners,” which for those following along makes a lot more sense than “Stick!”

I registered a web domain at www.MentorshipCoach.com, and set up my practice e-mail as Steve@MentorshipCoach.com. With that domain name chosen I have clarity about my practice, and I finally feel settled into a direction for my future work.

May You Learn to Love Your Twisty Roads,

Steve Coxsey

Psychoachelor

2007-04-13T19:34:00.000-07:00

It’s been two decades since I started graduate school to get my master’s in child psychology. When I was choosing a school, some had a strong affiliation with one set of beliefs and practices, while most favored an “eclectic” approach. The student got to study many different theories and views and then integrate them into his own personal view of what makes people do the things they do, what causes psychological disorders, and what works to resolve them.

That seemed like a complete mess!

At 21, I didn’t have enough experience and broad knowledge to choose one belief system and stick with it, so I chose an eclectic school. But for those same reasons I wasn’t prepared to pick and choose from all the various schools of thought to develop my own approach. Many parts of many theories made sense, but a lot was hard to swallow. There was no clear answer.

I found one answer outside the psychology department. I learned play therapy from one of the leading figures in the field, Dr. Garry Landreth. He taught me child-centered play therapy, a specific theoretical approach to a particular population—young children.

I loved it because it made sense and respected the nature of children during the earlier developmental stages. But mostly I loved it for its clarity. I didn’t have to consider conflicting theories and choose from a variety of options. I learned to approach situations from a complete, integrated view that gave me a few options, not dozens.

But when I worked with older children, or adolescents, or adults, I started picking things from other theoretical models. I started with client-centered, meaning I had to pay close attention, hear the feelings not directly spoken, and paraphrase back to help my clients communicate clearly to me. That process makes a client pay close attention to what he’s saying and helps him figure out his own views and beliefs. It’s a powerful tool by itself. But I found myself slowly adding other things.

I added the cognitive-behavioral model, where you help a client see the connections between thoughts, beliefs, feelings, and actions. It gives him greater awareness so he can act instead of simply reacting.

I used gestalt techniques like imagining a conversation, or even playing out the conversation, with someone not in the room. Or having a client imagine handling a situation in a completely different way. I learned to add symbolic events, like imagining walking out of a room and turning off the light, closing the door, and walking away, to represent closure.

I learned Jung—his symbols, his archetypes, his homage to the unconscious. I doubt I’ll ever become a Jungian analyst, but there were times when a client mentioned a recurring dream or a meaningful storyline from a book or movie, and thanks to Jung I could see the underlying importance.

So I slowly learned to love the freedom of studying different theories and approaches and integrating them into my practice. And there’s the rub.

Coaching as a field is in the process of creating credibility through standard practices. To accomplish this coaching is being pretty narrowly defined. This means the coach’s responses are much more limited than an eclectic therapist’s skills. It’s like being a jazz musician who wants to play classical music—but being told you can only play the flute and perform pieces by Bach.

Psychology is the study of human behavior—all of it, not just disorders. Counseling is the study of the promotion of healthy human growth and development. Both fields should be at the forefront of helping people improve their lives the way coaching does, but they lag far behind. I believe coaching is rising up so quickly because the focus in counseling and psychology has been on psychotherapy for too long.

There will be a dynamic tension between positive psychology and counseling for personal development on one side, and life coaching on the other, for a long time. I will be straddling these fields and integrating them, because I am a counselor trained in psychology who is becoming a coach. I can set aside the role of therapist when I am coaching someone, because the destination is different. But I won’t be able to set aside the role of counselor or student of human behavior. They’re how I understand people.

Right now, today, I consider coaching to be a specialty area within my counseling practice. It is a specific way of promoting personal growth and development, much as play therapy is a specific way of helping young children resolve emotional challenges. I’m sure my understanding will change in many ways in the coming years as I learn more about integrating these new skills and theories into my practice. For now, I’m trying to become the best Psychoachelor I can be.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Catching Shmuley

2007-04-06T10:59:00.000-07:00

I Love Shmuley!

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach has the TV show “Shalom in the Home” and helps families in crisis. I’ve only seen a portion of the show a couple of times, but I saw him on Oprah.

I don’t intentionally watch Oprah—except that day she gave away a bunch of cars. I read on the inernet what she had done and found out the show was about to air locally, so I tuned in. And one other time, when she interviewed Shawn Hornsby and his family when he was returned home after missing for 4 years. So that’s twice that I intentionally watched. It’s not my habit.

I usually stumble on Oprah if I turn on the TV in the afternoon and it happens to be on. I see shoe designers and pizza tours of the country and I change the channel. But a few weeks back Shmuley was on, and I was hooked.

He speaks from a place of deep wisdom that is so true I found myself agreeing and wondering why we all didn’t automatically realize these obvious truths on our own. I went to Barnes & Noble to check out his book and wound up buying two. I just got to the first of them in my reading list this week.

“Ten Conversations You Need to Have with Your Children” is a treasure. Shmuley speaks very comfortably and sincerely about morality and character being the essential measures of success in life. He writes about connectedness, recognizing it sustains us through struggles and gives meaning to life. He shows there is really no contest between a life of principle and connection on one hand, and a life of accumulating things and social status on the other.

Shmuley explains his beliefs by referring to his Jewish faith. He is a rabbi, of course, and a family counselor as well. He gives examples of other rabbis disagreeing with his positions on certain topics, like arguing with God, which he supports. I don’t know where his beliefs fall compared to contemporary Jewish theology, but I like his understanding of the faith.

There is a comforting parallel I see between Shmuley’s beliefs and what for me is the most approachable view of Christianity, presented through Christian counseling. This field best explains the moral law for me. It tells us the moral law exists to teach us our nature and the nature of God.

If we follow the moral law, we have more meaning and contentment in life because we are respecting our own needs, as God designed us. If we break the moral law, we are injuring ourselves and our relationships to other people.

This view honors morality in a more profound way than a focus on punishment, which overlooks the relational nature of God and mankind. It defends morality far more than the relativist position that Jesus was a “good moral teacher” with recommendations for us to consider.

This is the view of morality and principled living that Shmuley embraces and explains so well in his book. Acting with honor and character brings us closer to one another and to God.

If more clergy catch on to this idea, counselors and coaches may be out of work!

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

2 Heads…

2007-03-30T15:40:00.000-07:00

I had a very special experience yesterday evening. I had called in for a Q&A session with Valerie Young, the “Dreamer in Residence” at Changing Course and designer of the “Fast Track Your Dream” program. I joined the program to help me define the new direction for my practice and get started.

Valerie had this Q&A session to get feedback from us and to hear our questions about applying the program to our specific situations. The creative career consultants who monitor the member forum have answered many questions already and the group members provide each other buckets of ideas and loads of support, so there weren’t many questions about “now.” We asked some about the future, thinking down the road to when we are established but adding new income streams.

Since the questions were answered before the allotted hour was up, Valerie very graciously indulged my questions on a different topic. I wanted to hear a little about her experience in putting together “Fast Track Your Dream” and what she learned that could benefit other people planning information products and considering membership sites.

Valerie’s program is amazing. It includes workbooks to help members understand their unique gifts and passions, compiled articles on ways people discovered joyful work and transitioned from an unfulfilling j-o-b, online resources with creative work examples and the steps to take for discovery and life change, audio CDs of workshops, idea planners….it’s a lot of stuff! I have a plan to be through everything by the end of the summer.

Basically, she put together many of her top information products and bundled them for this program, in addition to the members’ forum and teleclasses (2 per month, if I remember right). I had questions about a much less ambitious idea. I was thinking about a “package” that includes a series of teleclasses, like the 6 sessions of “How To Talk So Kids Will Listen” for parents, plus my feedback on workbook assignments, e-mail support, and maybe a members’ forum for sharing ideas.

You see, I’ve been wanting to have a business model different from fixed length sessions at set intervals, which is based on the medical model of therapy. Valerie reminded me that it’s really up to clients to decide what model they like. She suggested I do some market research and ask people how they would be likely to use services.

I’ve helped conduct market research so I should have been thinking this all along. But I wasn’t, and Valerie helped me get focused on the best way to define my service model.

I would probably have suggested the same thing to another person starting a new business or considering a new direction. I’m working for FREE helping an organization determine their clients’ needs and preferences. I mean, I KNOW THIS STUFF! But it took the perspective of someone else to remind me to apply it to my business.

Valerie gave me some other useful insight and pointers, too, and I am very grateful. My lesson? When you’re pretty sure you know what you’re doing—prove it! Prove it by talking to someone else and explaining what you’re thinking and planning. I bet it will help you remember what you already knew but forgot along the way.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

My Evil Twin Blog

2007-03-24T08:33:00.000-07:00

I've been using this blog to write about my professional life, starting with my transition from therapist to mentor and coach. That change requires a lot of positive thinking and hope and optimism. Those things are in me--even though I have to look pretty hard sometimes to find them. But that's not all I am!

I decided to create another blog to house my thoughts from others areas of my life, and from the other parts of me.

My new blog is at www.StevesNotNice.com. My first post there is an essay I wrote for my web site, which I never uploaded because I haven't finished my web site rewrite. It's called "I Am Not Nice." It might be the most civilized thing I post there.

I have a heart that seeks after the good of others. I believe in the Law of Love as explained by Jesus the Christ in the gospels: The first commandment is to love the Lord God with all your heart, soul, and mind. The second is to love your neighbor as yourself. That's powerful stuff, but he says something even more incredible next. He says all the religious law and all the commandments are really about those two laws! Know where you come from, honor your Creator, and care for each other. Wow!

That pull is definitely in me, and it's a big reason why I value mentoring relationships that help people find their gifts and develop them. It's a big reason I like to see groups develop into welcoming places for people to find and develop their gifts. It's why I believe in redemption and restoration, and here I mean in relationships between people. It's a big part of why I learned to be a therapist and still want to help people who feel lonely and lost.

But I'm not really that good very often. I'm not "sweetness and light," even when I am most attuned to the goals and beliefs of caring for each other in community and fellowship.

I believe in the "corruptible soul" because I have one. I believe in redemption, or salvation, for that corruptible soul because I need it.

And if I only post the thoughts from my professional life and professional development, I will be giving a very narrow, and ultimately deceptive, view of who I am. So I started the other blog.

I have posted on a weekly schedule here. That may change, but I will be more inclined to follow a schedule here, meaning a set day for posting but having possible additional posts--like this one.

With the other blog I will post as I feel inclined. It will be more random, kind of like the less disciplined and more corruptible way I feel much of the time. Follow along if you will.

May You Find Authenticity,

Steve Coxsey

It Won’t Always Be FREE

2007-03-23T11:27:00.000-07:00

After my slightly whiny post last week, I realized something very important. While I was struggling with having to work for free for a while, I wasn’t even prepared for getting paid.

Coaching and Distance Counseling (like my professional lingo?) are usually paid by credit card. The “professional” uses some sort of credit card processing system, and if they don’t have a merchant account it’s pretty easy to start with PayPal. I hadn’t even taken the steps to set that up for the time when I have paying clients.

I had a simple PayPal account for the corporation (The Knowledge Store, which I’m still planning on changing) but hadn’t set it up to process credit card transactions. I had nothing tied in to the business account I used as a Professional Counselor. Now I’m set up with both accounts. When I have products to sell, I can put them on a website and get paid through PayPal when people buy them. When a client wants a consultation, I will be able to charge a credit card.

I’ve also signed up with Clickbank so I can choose to sell my e-books there—whenever I have e-books. I spend time looking at sites that have materials related to the theme of my practice, mentoring and mentorship coaching to develop people’s gifts. I can become an affiliate and display other people’s products on my website and receive a commission when my web visitors buy.

For some of you, this is basic stuff. For others, it might be completely foreign. I feel like I’m still in the beginning stages of learning about internet based commerce, but I talk to people and read forum posts from people who don’t even know these basics. I think it helps to learn these simple steps you can take with no cost and no risk.

Now that I’m set up to receive payments, I’m thinking a lot about how to offer services. The standard in coaching seems to be asking clients to pay for four sessions at a time in advance and offering limited e-mail support between sessions. Structure like this helps the professional with planning, I’m sure, and helps clients focus on their goals and the steps they committed to taking. But it’s patterned after the medical model of psychotherapy, where clients come in on a regular basis for a planned amount of time. Is this the best way?

I need to start some “market research,” which means asking people, about how they might use the help of a mentor or coach. There might be some who want more phone time and don’t want e-mail support, some who want lengthy e-mail communication a few times a week and little or no phone support, and some who will have varied needs from month to month.

The idea of finding new paradigms for offering service is intriguing to me. It falls into the expanding idea of organic learning and development that keeps appearing as I go through the creative process of defining what I do. I interact with an idea and learn more about it by trying it out in different ways. I change to accommodate something new I discover through that interaction, and then I learn something more about the idea when my perspective has changed. It’s a discovery process.

I will be planning different ways to offer my services because clients will need different types and different levels of interaction at different times. I want to be ready to offer what they need.

And now, I will be ready to receive payments—because It Won’t Always Be FREE.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Be Careful What You Chase

2007-03-16T21:58:00.000-07:00

I have discovered that, when you are chasing wisdom, it will sometimes turn around and bite you. It gathers one tooth at a time.

I first learned from career counseling guru Barbara Sher’s books that one great way to begin to transition to a new career, or to try out a new field of work, is to develop your own “internship.” I put the word in quotes because the real word would be practicum. An internship is usually paid, although very little, because it offers on-the-job training. A practicum is unpaid. During graduate school I had practicums (practica? practicii?) to learn psychological assessment, consultation, behavioral intervention, and therapy. I paid the school for the class and provided my services to the partner organizations for FREE.

My wife, a family practice physician, had an internship after completing medical school. She was paid. With the crazy schedule it worked out to less than minimum wage, but it was money.

Back to my point, or Barbara Sher’s point: spend time working in the field and you will gain knowledge and experience that will make you more valuable and help you see ways to transition to paid work.

Another tooth in the bite: students getting training for life coach certification are encouraged to have a few “pro bono” clients at the beginning. “Pro bono” means “for the good,” specifically the public good. It does NOT mean for your own financial good, because it means for FREE.

Joanna Rowling, AKA J. K. Rowling, finished the manuscript to her first novel while “on the dole” in England. That meant she was getting government assistance because she was not working. Why wasn’t she working? She has a master’s degree, for goodness sake, and had been teaching in Portugal before that! She wasn’t working, meaning getting paid a salary, because she was dedicating herself to writing. She did not get paid while she was doing it. At the time she was actually doing the work, she was doing it for FREE.

She did, of course, eventually get a publisher and some royalties, and a multiple-book deal and a multiple-movie-rights deal. And she is now worth about a billion dollars, because Harry Potter is phenomenally popular. But she built up her worth by working for FREE.

Internet marketing experts and internet business consultants point out that one of the best ways to start making a steady stream of income is by developing information products, like e-books and audio courses. Once they’re produced, you can sell them with little production cost if downloaded by the buyer, or a nominal cost if you produce copies to mail out. An information product that keeps selling, even one or two per day, can generate a steady stream of income for a long time. But if you’re not already established in your practice (that’s me), the whole time you are creating the product to sell, you are working for FREE.

Here’s how it all came together to bite me. I need to be looking for every reasonable opportunity to do what I want to do, which is to mentor people in discovering and nurturing their gifts and helping to developing welcoming and nurturing communities where people are able to mentor one another and help each other discover and develop their gifts. I have to start by doing the work, even if that means working for FREE.

As my competence builds and my experience grows, my value will become more apparent to more people and I will be in a position to charge for my services. As I gain experience, I will be able to develop relevant information products to sell. But I have to start doing the work and building up my value with the faith that I will be paid in the future for what I am doing and learning now. Which means I have to start by working for FREE.

So far, I’m doing great at not making money! But I am beginning to do the work and find my rhythm. I will be paid in the future based on the expert I am becoming today. Until then, I get to make sure that I’ve chosen work I love, which feeds my soul and helps me feel energized, because I’m working for FREE.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Free-zines

2007-03-09T21:39:00.000-08:00

Newsletters. Or E-zines. They’re important to a practice as a consultant and coach. I know, because the newsletters (or e-zines) by the consultants and coaches for consultants and coaches all say so.

They say a lot more, too. I’ve been gathering wisdom and useful knowledge about the way to put together a newsletter, what to write, how often to publish, and similar weighty matters. I will list some of the important findings I have made so the rest of you don’t have to dig through all the opinions to find the top recommendations.

4 Publish your newsletter monthly at least.
4 Publish your newsletter weekly at most.
4 Publish your newsletter about once every 10 days.
4 Publish your newsletter daily.
4 Why in the world do some people publish newsletters daily? That’s way too often and will turn off subscribers.

4 Follow a consistent format in each edition.
4 Don’t get trapped by format.
4 Have different sections that readers come to expect.
4 Don’t overdo it by having different sections that readers expect you to put in each edition.

4 Publish it for free because no one will sign up for an online newsletter.
4 It’s best to publish a newsletter that people will pay for because you get recurring income.
4 Publish a free newsletter but use it to promote your products.
4 Publish a free newsletter and don’t talk much about your products or it will look like a sales letter.

4 Give away lots of information for free.
4 Give away tastes of information so people will be interested and want to buy your products.

4 Just give quick “How to” or “What to avoid” kinds of ideas in a newsletter or you’ll lose interest.
4 Tell personal stories about your life and your discoveries because people want to be drawn in.

4 Make sure everyone has a double opt-in, where they ask to be on the list and then also respond to an e-mail to verify they want to be on the list.
4 Take people who sign up for a free report and stick them on your list as a “freebie” without worrying about that double opt-in.

4 Use HTML and nice graphics to look professional.
4 Use simple text and a basic format so it’s not too showy, and so everyone can read it with their e-mail software.
4 Send out simple text e-mails with links to your newsletter, which is actually hosted on your web site.

4 Include lots of content; get other people to write guest articles, and look for articles to include.
4 Keep it concise.

If I’ve missed any of the truly important discoveries, please forgive me. There’s been a lot to sift through.

It reminds me of the years I spent as a member of a professional writers’ group. Aspiring novelists would ask the published authors things like, “How many adjectives should I have in a sentence?” The helpful, detailed explanations about the purpose and use of adjectives would be ignored, so in frustration the authors would resort to the default answer: “One and a half.”

I subscribe to many different types of free newsletters or e-zines. I read a few and parts of others and toss out most of them. It’s not always the same ones I read or toss out.

The key? I read the interesting articles, even if they’re lengthy, and I skip the ones that aren’t relevant or aren’t believable.

Good thing I’m just doing this blog to track my transition to the world of coaching and consulting! Who has time to be relevant, interesting, and credible?

May We All Learn to Trust Ourselves,

Steve Coxsey

$52.51

2007-03-02T18:28:00.000-08:00

Medicaid pays Licensed Professional Counselors $52.51 per session for therapy, at least here in Texas. It’s an amount that has started to haunt me.

When I was re-entering the private practice world as a therapist, $52.51 per session seemed reasonable. Working with a group practice in an office setting, I could expect to earn about 50% of the money I generated. With managed care companies paying anywhere from $50 to $65 or so per session I was looking at earning about $25 to $33 per session. A full session lasts a minimum of 45 face-to-face minutes, and shouldn’t go more than 50 minutes unless there’s an urgent need. Add the prep time with reviewing notes and treatment plans, add charting time, add a little time for filling out paperwork to get paid, and I’d be lucky to finish all the work for one session in one and a half hours.

$30 for one and a half hours is $20 per hour. Since it’s contract work I would pay self-employment tax, making it comparable to $18.50 per hour. And there are no benefits of any kind: no paid holidays, no sick days, no insurance coverage, no nothin'.

Working with children in foster care, I was going to be paid all of the $52.51 per session. I wouldn’t have to pay any percentage to use an office, but I would have to pay my own overhead. Sessions take place in the children’s schools or homes, so there is no office rent. I needed my home office, which was already set up. The main trade-off for not having office space was the driving time. I was hoping the total drive time per session would be 45 minutes to one hour. There are caseworkers and foster care case managers to talk with, plus foster parents and school personnel, so I expected to have more writing, e-mailing, and talking on the phone for each session than in a traditional office practice, too. I was thinking I could spend about two and a half hours per session. I figured it would generate $20 per hour, with just a little overhead. It sounded reasonable, didn’t it?

My first two clients were in the range of the less-than-an-hour round trip. All the rest were 45 to 55 minutes away, making the round trip one and a half to nearly two hours long. Report requirements were more than I expected. I was doing good to make $15 per hour before paying any overhead and any of the costs of driving. The work was rewarding at times in ways other than money, but not often, and not enough to make it worthwhile. My experiment was over by September. I accepted no new clients and finished treatment with all but one. A new therapist was finally chosen to replace me, and I had my final session this January.

And then the $52.51 started haunting me. First, Medicaid put a hold on paying me for my one session in December. They thought it was over the total number of sessions allowed, but I had prior authorization. They said I would have to wait until it was denied and then appeal with the authorization information. After about nine weeks, I finally got the denial, and found out they had ADJUSTED the claim on my seven previous sessions with that client. They were saying I owed them $367.57. I had authorization for all seven sessions, but I had not completed the claims properly.

After nearly an hour on the phone going through each 24-digit claim number and providing the appropriate 10-digit authorization number for each one, I was told the claims would be re-evaluated. I do not know when, nor how much more I may have to do in order to get it, but I WILL GET MY $52.51!

Therapists are being pushed to get National Provider Identifier numbers, and many managed care companies will be requiring them. Managed care is also transitioning to on-line submission of claims and client information. Therapists have been able to avoid the complicated requirements of HIPAA (health care records-keeping guidelines) by avoiding internet-based transactions and records. With the NPI and the trend to electronic filing, therapists will be required to comply with all the standards of HIPAA, even in small solo practices. It’s going to be an added expense and a regular, dull headache.

It’s good to be gone.

May You Find Your Tribe and Join Their Song,

Steve Coxsey