Plaque:  Live Well, raku, 13"t x 9" wide, slab built, hand made with handmade and retail made jewelry dangles, by Tammy Vitale, $55 plus shipping

Here we are already at September 5 – I know it’s September because I never saw it coming.  What is it about holiday weekends that sets everything off?  I don’t even recognize a holiday weekend because my work week (part-time job) is Tuesday through Thursday and everything else is art: making it or the business of.  And Husband is always off and home on Monday, but somehow the rhythm is off anyways and here is it Wednesday (Wednesday!) and I’m just now catching my breathe and looking around to see what day it is.  Time warp or something!

Look at the difference a good photographic set up makes for Live Well above – isn’t that amazing?!  I’m feeling pretty good about having bought that even if I now have work scattered everywhere, and even if when I’m in a hurry it’s still going to be on the basement floor for a "draft" photo.  But I can definitely see that for on-line purposes, it pays to have a good set up.  And I have one thanks to Alyson Stanfield’s 10 minute coaching session.

And, ladies and gentlemen, I have signed up for OneCoach for a year long run at getting myself strategically set up market wise.  I have a one-month money-back guarantee and will be diving in this evening on a phone call training (just listening).  There is also a lot of on-line archives that I downloaded last night for my spare time listening (some of it is audio – but then I need something audio in my car that I have control over.  I have a 12 disc CD player that sits in my trunk and is years and years old and very cranky).  But I can always cart around my old boombox if I need to.  At any rate, there is  a lot of information and I decided to give myself this gift and consider it a year in school.  Here’s the deal though, so far it’s really more reminding me of what I know I should do – after all I do have a Business Admin undergrad.  And the customer thing?  You know, follow up, pay attention to those who have already bought from you – I know this too.  From the viewpoint of a community-based organizer – lists are gold.  I know that.  And yet I have this resistance (I keep hoping, actually, that it will just fall in my lap if I do the right affirmations), and keep hoping it will be easier and somehow I will get younger so that I feel like I have a good run at it.  That’s what I’m hoping the coaching and work can help me through:  how to get over my own resistance and my own blocks.

And you want to know what convinced me?

Well, I’m going to tell you whether you want to know or not.  Go to FedEx.com and look at the logo.  Now really look at it.  Now look away.  Did you see the arrow?  Go back and look.  In the "Ex" part of the logo there is a white arrow between the E and the X – the negative space makes a right-pointing arrow.  And the remark that goes along with that is:  "what is it that I am not seeing?"  Got me – what is it that is right in front of me that I am not seeing?  and "We don’t know what we don’t know." 

So between Alyson and OneCoach I’m hoping to start seeing and learning what I don’t know.  And I’m chalking the cost up to continuing education credits.  I know that some professionals have to do that to keep their credentials.  Well, I work for myself, and I am going to require that I update my knowledge of the areas that I need to be successful in order to keep my job.  And I’m going to remember that Grandma Moses didn’t get her start until she was around 78 – that gives me almost 20 years to catch up with where she started, instead of sitting here and getting lost in my head about how if only I had stayed with my art when I started in my mid-late 20s to go back to school, and took art, think of where I’d be now (painting instead of doing clay – and is that necessarily any better?).  Yes.  I know.  "If only" is always fantasy land.  So instead of living in the past and worrying about how in the world I’m going to ever make it work now, and instead of staying stuck at the level I’m now at because I can’t figure out how to make the next step, I’m going to take charge of the situation like the CEO that I am and if I make mistakes and spend some money along the way, well, it’s all lessons.

And I’m going to bring you right along with me.  What do you think?!

thought for the day:  At first people refuse to believe that a strange new thing can be done, and then they begin to hope it can be done, then they see it can be done – then it is done and all the world wonders why it was not done centuries ago.  Frances Hodgson Burnett quoted in "A Creative Companion:  How to Free Your Creative Spirit" by SARK