What A Time To Make Big Changes!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

The Fog of Possibility

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

Virtual Hiccups

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

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

On The Twisting Road

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