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Take 5 Minutes to Find a State of Blogger Wellness

Filed Under Business Life, Successful Blog | 18 Comments

Not long ago, I asked Pamir Kiciman about his ideas for a guest post. Pamir writes for Reiki Help Blog about practical spirituality. I wasn’t disappointed when his first response said, “I really see no content to help the person doing the biz, it’s all about the tech, biz itself, content, clients, selling, etc. . . . So my idea for your readers is a piece about being healthy at the desktop, some practical, easy-to-use self-enhancing methods to engender wellness for even better output.”

Take 5 minutes to do what Pamir suggests. I did.

Blogger Wellness
by Pamir Kiciman, BA, RM. CHt

Lay of the land

You’ve identified your niche, settled on a blog platform, know your categories, have a SEO strategy and have put yourself out there on the Live Web. Way to go! It’s fun, exciting and fast. Your blog has a clean design and nifty widgets, comments are coming in, people Digg your content and you feel legit.

You social network, your workspace is simple, you love the resolution of your LCD monitor and your chair is ergoncomfy. You’re ready for another day on Web 2.0, or rather the Web on steroids! There’s the Twitter notification, the new comment too and your buddy IMs, a potential client fills out your contact form. Meanwhile your lover texts you about dinner and romance.

Life is good. Or is it? You have nagging tension in your shoulders, your mouse hand hurts and you want to replace your neck. The next morning none of these are too noticeable. Well, at least until the fifteenth email. Then discomfort creeps in again.

After some time, you numb to the physical symptoms although they persist. Yet productivity drops. Your monitor doesn’t look so hi-def to your bleary eyes, and you feel lethargic, even resentful. You feel you don’t have a single original thought to contribute and everything is an effort.

You promise yourself to do something about it before it gets to this point next time, but when you scour the Web next to nothing comes up for desktop health. Until now. In fact the first page of results in Google returns links about getting your health record on your desktop. If you search ‘blogger wellness’ Google asks if you meant ‘blogs health’ because that’s a nice little category.

Antidotes to blogger stress

There’s a natural function of your body that is with you 24/7/365. This function takes place in its quiet way independently of you. It has a job to do and it doesn’t wait for you to show up. Thankfully. It follows a rhythm and doesn’t waver or hesitate. It comes in and goes out like a finely-tuned clock, and doesn’t expect anything. Selflessly it serves you, while you mostly ignore it.

Can you guess? It’s your BREATH!

Nature has so arranged it that the diaphragm will expand and contract on its own, oxygen will enter and carbon dioxide leave, the lungs will fill and empty keeping you alive. After all, during sleep you don’t notice your breath, why should you when awake? You have so many more important things to handle!

Have you ever watched a healthy baby breathe? See that little stomach go up and down? Notice how easy and natural it is for them. Their breaths are full, smooth not jerky, starting at the abdomen they breathe and fill the lungs. They exhale all the way. There isn’t any constriction or unusual noise in the breath.

This is the breath you’ve forgotten. This is the breath you put on automatic pilot. Your breath is the one friend that you can ill afford to take for granted. It doesn’t require a cell phone or e-mail. It’s free and loyal. It doesn’t argue back.

But breathing without awareness means you’re not getting half of what you could from this resource. The breath obviously brings oxygen into your body and takes carbon dioxide out. The action of the diaphragm massages the internal organs. Even these mundane benefits aren’t properly available if your breath is shallow or high in the chest, or if you catch yourself not breathing for a few seconds (it happens quite often!).

More than all the biological factors of the breath, what it really brings is the new in essence form. Undoubtedly there is more than nutrients, water, oxygen and heartbeat that sustains you. If you think about the longterm effects of stress, you realize that it sticks to your organs, muscles and mind long after the stimulus that created the stress is gone. When you breathe with awareness, you also replace old stuck energies of all kinds with freshness, and each conscious breath becomes a house-cleansing.

Five-minute Breathing

Recommended for daily use at your monitor, 3 times a day for 5 minutes each time.

  • Turn off your monitor & sound, as well as cell phone. Turn away from your monitor if you like.
  • Sit comfortably in your chair with your spine erect but not rigid.
  • Keep your feet flat on the floor, legs uncrossed.
  • Hands are comfortably in your lap.
  • Get a sense of your posture & purpose. This is your time.
  • Tune into your body. Simply observe your body’s natural breath, without changing it.
  • Get to know your breath, how your body breathes, and all the sensations and feelings associated with it.
  • Gradually deepen your breath and make it slower and longer.
  • Direct your diaphragm to expand slowly, inhaling slowly, making sure the breath starts in the abdomen and fills the lungs from the bottom up.
  • Consciously direct on the exhalation, making sure to exhale slowly and all the way down.
  • Continue breathing like this for the rest of the five minutes.
  • You may reach a calm, heightened sense of awareness.
  • After practicing daily for a while, breathing may become minimal toward the end of the allotted time.

When done, take a moment to feel your presence in the room, open your eyes and continue with your day.

Thanks, Pamir. I’m feeling better already!

–ME “Liz” Strauss

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Where Are You in the Blogging Gold Rush?

Filed Under Business Life, Successful Blog | 23 Comments

History Has a Way of Repeating Itself

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A recent article in the NY Times went on in detail about the digital sweatshop — bloggers who work at home paid to write by the post. It held up the deaths of two bloggers and the heart attack of a third. Then it followed that with quotes by big-name bloggers to underscore the point that blogging isn’t good for our health.

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet.

It distressed me to read this, because I see the reality behind it.
But it distressed me more, because I see the misperceptions glaring back.

We need to see reality to make healthy choices about stress.

Though it uses the word, emerging the article makes blogging sound like a fully grown industry. It’s not.

Business Pioneers — A Blogging Gold Rush

Blogging is not an industry no matter how we dress it up or talk about it. An industry has a structure that has established itself with conventions and models that prove themselves time. We’re still living in “carve a path” pioneer times. The business of blogging is still trying to prove viability.

Lately it seems I meet three sorts — blogging gold rushers, business pioneers, and those who watch.

During the gold rush, some folks went with dreams of striking it rich by panning the water and having luck. Some folks chronicled the adventure. Some folks watched. Business pioneers — folks with plans and business models — built places for people to eat, sleep, buy goods, and get entertained. Fewer folks, business pioneers with determination and long vision, built railroads, communication systems, dams, and business empires. Some folks worked for companies who were doing those things. Some of those workers got paid well. Some did not. In between them all were shysters who came to make fast cash and run.

Some folks won. Some folks cheated. Some folks reported events. Some folks lost. Some folks didn’t participate at all.

Where are you in this blogging gold rush?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Have a plan! Work with Liz!!
SOBCon08 is May 2,3,4 in Chicago. Register now!

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Using Common Wisdom and Goals to Avoid Perceived Productivity

Filed Under Inside-Out Thinking, Perfect Virtual Manager, Successful Blog | 22 Comments

Working Hard and Getting Nowhere

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Every company that I work with has some issue with perceived productivity — people working hard at things that add no value. It might be a team that’s lost direction or a culture that does things as they’ve always been done. It could a department who never evaluates the effectivenees of their process.

I suppose that comes from a misperception that hard work is equal to a positive contribution. It’s not so. A positive contribution is any work that moves us closer to our goals — sometimes that’s hard work; sometimes it’s simple and elegant.

When we work at home, it’s easy to fall victim to the lure of productivity that gets us nowhere. We feel like we’re working. No one says our time investment isn’t worth it. In the past few months, people have said these things to me:

I’m all I can and in the last 6 months, I’ve only made $600.

I work 14 hours a day. I guess you need money to make money.

In my last job, I was a high performing VP. Now I can’t get a client to talk to me.

Every time I asked what they were doing. They answered with common wisdom about successful blogging.

  • I spend hours writing high-quality blog posts.
  • I spend hours writing comments and social networking.
  • I tweak my blog to make it more inviting.

If you’ve got a blog, you know that it’s work to do all of that. It’s highly productive work, if the goal is to build a first-rate blog audience. But the folks who came to me had a goal to build a client-based business. They were working hard on some things that wouldn’t take them where wanted to be.

It was perceived productivity. Wisdom needs to match up wth where we’re going.

Each person took a minute to apply their goals to what they were doing. The wisdom matched to their goals made a new purpose and new direction. Every high-quality blog post and every hour spent networking and commenting was considered in light of their business. A slight shift made a big difference. Time spent became highly productve.

Wisdom + goals = direction, purpose, productivity

Ever been victim to perceived productivity?

I have. Now I keep my goal in front of me.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!! SOBCon08, Biz School for Bloggers, is May 2,3,4 in Chicago. Register now!

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The Best Business Advice Ever . . . in 50 Words

Filed Under Business Life, Successful Blog | 12 Comments

Have you been following the b5media Business Apprentice Team Challenge? Up to now, two teams have been advising a fictional entrepreneur called Kay on her business decisions. Last week, while I was gone, my team — the Aces — won again. They are a brilliant group. You can catch up on what’s happened so far at b5media Business Apprentice updates.

This week it becomes every blog on our own.

Our Task: Give Kay the best business advice we’ve ever heard . . . in 50 words. –Liz

Some Advice for Kay

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My father listened more than he talked. After a large sit-down at our house, a friend once remarked, “That meal was over an hour. The only word I heard your father say was bread. He didn’t even ask for the butter.”

When I told my dad, his reply made me laugh. He said, “I don’t like butter much.”

My dad left home and school in 1919. He was 12. Everything he knew about business and life he learned from paying attention to the world around him.

It was my dad who taught me to view the world as a lifelong business school.

The Best Business Advice Ever . . . in 50 Words

Each morning when he drove me to school, my dad would point out people we saw and tell me what he observed. When we got the place where he dropped me off, we had a small ritual — a sort of script we would go through. I can’t say quite how it started, and I no longer remember it word for word. But it went something like this . . .

Dad would park the car, turn to me, smile, and ask, “What’s the score?”

I would answer the same every time, with words I had learned from him — bits at a time — over the years. To this day it’s the best business advice I’ve ever heard.

Learn your business from your customers. Understand their minds, their hearts, and their lives. Do what you do to make their lives easier. When a problem comes, leave them a place to stand and stand tall beside them. . . . And remember, everyone is your customer, even your dad.

Dad

Then his eyes would light with smile. He’d offer his huge, work-worn hand, shake mine, give a nod, and say, “It’s a pleasure doing business with you.”

I’d answer something like, “Oh dad, you’re too cool.”

All I would add is cherish the rituals and traditions. They make moments remarkably unforgettable.

What’s the best business advice you ever heard? Is there a story that goes with it?

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If you think my dad’s advice would serve a young entrepreneur, would you give Successful-Blog a vote in the poll in the sidebar at TAXGIRL?



–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

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Getting Comments: Seven Secrets of a Superstar Conversationalist

Filed Under Community, Successful Blog | 36 Comments

A Superstar Conversationalist? Who Me?

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Chris Brogan, no shrinking violet, called his blog post 39,000 comments. He said it was the first thing I said. It wasn’t really. I talked about Becky McCray and Darren Rowse, and all of the people who come here. The comments were just what caught his attention.

Then in the comments to that post, Phil Gerbyshak — the all-time relationship geek, not a quiet job — named me a superstar conversationalist.

I hear my older brothers translating . . . kid, they’re saying you can’t shut up.

Seven Secrets of a Superstar Conversationalist

Writing or talking about what we know isn’t a problem for most folks. People don’t ask me how to do that. What they ask is How do you get folks to talk back?

Here are seven of my secrets.

    Secret 1. Be an enthusiastic learner.
    The words of folks who stand at the podium and talk down to me never sound like conversation. They sound more like a lecture. Who wants to be lectured by an expert? It’s more fun to talk to a friend who knows.

    Learners, on the other hand, are magnetically attractive. They’re not intimidating. They offer a subtle invitation to participate. I know if I stick around I might find something I never knew before. Learners ask me questions they really want to know the answer to. When they get an answer, they ask more.

    Secret 2 Be imperfectly human.
    Don’t finish up every blog post so perfectly that I have no room to answer. Make that list with what you know, but don’t research it to death so that I can’t add to it. I want to talk to you too. Conversation always means you say something. Then I add what I know to it. We do it together.

    A conversation is always started, constantly revised, and never finished. We don’t tie our conversations up with a bow and hand them in to our 8th grade teacher. Let’s not do that with our blog posts either.

    Secret 3. Be an active listener.
    What is a conversation if I’m talking to myself? . . . hearing voices and talking to them? Isn’t that a sign of something?

    People are the most important part of any conversation. I listen with every cell. I try to crawl inside the experience they’re relating. I’ve discovered so much about the world and myself, and most of all, the folks who come to visit, by taking the time to listen and answering back. I answer and ask questions to make sure that I understood what I heard. Comments are just like real-life conversation.

    Secret 4 Be an easy laugher.
    Laughter makes the world turn easier. It gets the chemsitry in our brains going. We type faster and smile when we do. We connect and feel safer when we laugh together. My husband often says to me, “You’re smiling at your computer again.”

    Secret 5 Be you.
    I make a bad version of you. You make a bad version of me. Somehow we make a perfectly incredible versions of the unique individuals who we are.

    Blog your experience. Put your head and heart in what you write. If I tell my authentic truth and myunique view, no one can argue with that. Folks can’t help but respect it — the folks I want to interact with anway.. They want to know they they can tell theirs too. It sounds counterintuitive, but the more a writer tells his or her individual experience, the more people can identify with it.

    Secret 6 Be a cheerleader, a bartender, a friend, a host.
    Make a place where folks can be who they are. Make it about THEM. Be glad to see them. Be proud of their accomplishments. Have faith in their endeavors. If you care about their lives, they will care too. They’ll also care about yours and each others’. That’s how communities form.

    Secret 7 Be nice.
    I couldn’t leave that out — could I?

It hardly takes much to be gracious. Communities and conversations really build themselves. We don’t build them. If we stop trying to control them and let people know we’re not afraid to hear what they have to say in respect and honest communication. Amazing thing can truly happen.

I know. 39,000 comments was a long time ago.

I don’t really count comments. I count friends, and who could ever have enough of them?

C’mon let’s talk!

What did you right before you read this post? It had to be more interesting than reading about me.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

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