Not Afraid to Dream

Two weeks ago, Alice Barry did a delightful teleclass to celebrate the anniversary of her Joyfully Jobless life. The title of her program was 7 Lessons I’ve Learned in 7 Years in Business.

She told us that she learned her first lesson at a seminar Nick Williams and I did in Las Vegas called Creating an Inspired Business. What was that lesson that launched her?

Start where you are. To hear Alice tell it, those words served as a mantra and she began moving forward putting her ideas into action.

Today, her business, Entertaining the Idea, helps others put their ideas into action, too.

Alice isn’t the only person I know who’s building a dream, of course.

Liz deNesnera flew from her home in New Jersey to Los Angeles yesterday. She’s spending the week in California taking her Voice Over business to the next level. Happily, she also took time to spend several hours with me.

Like Alice, I first met Liz in person in a Creating an Inspired Business event in Las Vegas.

Liz had been a longtime subscriber to Winning Ways newsletter and had attended a Making a Living Without a Job seminar in New York, but this was the first time we’d officially met. “You’re not just a name on a mailing label anymore,” I joked after we’d become acquainted.

Since then, I’ve received excited calls from Liz when she wants to report on the growth of her business;  it was a real treat being able to get the latest update in person.

As usual, she was bubbling with excitement over the continuing growth of Hire Liz which puts her talents to work in both English and French.

Another former seminar participant has also been on my radar lately. I first met Dyan deNapoli when she attended Valerie Young’s Work at What You Love seminar in Northampton, MA.  Dyan was wearing her passion for penguins on her sleeve—and on her cute VW Beetle.

Her passion has brought her wonderful opportunities including lecturing on an Antarctic cruise and authoring The Great Penguin Rescue. Dyan is also the first person I’ve known to be featured as a speaker at TED Talks.

Then there’s Valerie Young. I’ve known her longer than the other three and still remember our first conversation when she called me after attending Making a Living Without a Job to discuss an idea she had to help corporate employees change course.

Over the years, she’s helped thousands of people do just that through her coaching and seminars. But that was only part of her entrepreneurial endeavors.

Valerie became a popular speaker on the Impostor Syndrome. One day a publisher came calling, and in mid-October her book, The Secret Thoughts of Successful Women, will be published. It’s a stunner.

I was honored to see the manuscript after she invited me to write a testimonial for the book. From the first chapter, I knew this was more than an ordinary business or personal growth book.

Yesterday, another big accolade came in for the still unavailable book when she learned that Publisher’s Weekly is giving it a starred review. Valerie wasn’t the only one who found that exciting!

I’ve been thinking a lot about all four of these inspiring women and what they have in common. Obviously, they’re all lifelong learners. They’ve also all patiently followed their dreams and created their own unique enterprises.

But the thing that just hit me about them all is that I’ve known all of them before any of these achievements occurred.

If there’s anything more inspiring than knowing real life dreamers who are also doers, I don’t know what it is. Their achievements add to the joy in our lives—and urge us to stretch farther.

It’s also easy to forget that when we see personal achievement, there was a time when it didn’t exist, but all successful people have a Before and After story.

That’s probably why writer Nikki Giovanni warns us, “Do not surround yourself with people who do not have dreams.” The After story is even sweeter when we were present Before it happened.

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Working on some wild dreams of your own? Join me on the Idea Safari and collect some dreambuilding tools.

Change One Thing

Have you ever had the experience of working hard to make a change only to discover that once you had done so, other things seemed to change all by themselves?

I thought of this mysterious phenomenon last week when I got the following message from fellow traveler Alice Barry.

In January I felt a real slump in my energy and felt like I was constantly battling my digestion and feeling awful all the time…really in pain. It was affecting my ability to take on work, focus and feel creative.

I joined a holistic health class to get some support and ended up kicking gluten out of my diet completely. Things changed instantly.

One of the biggest changes, besides clear thinking and great digestion with no pain, is that I am now actually losing weight naturally. I’m down 2 inches on my waist and my pants are falling off!

The other benefit is that after mucking through 2010 with not a single new idea for myself, I feel like the flood gates have opened.

I’ve started to talk out loud about my desire to learn voice over — something I’ve always dreamed of but allowed my theater professor’s discouragement to steer me away from so many years ago.

Last week, in a class I’m taking, I started brainstorming ways I could start applying my voice to the small business and entrepreneurial clients I have right now. Here’s where it gets good.

Three days later a contact of mine called me out of the blue and asked if I would be someone who could do the voice over work for a promotional video she had recently shot to promote her speaking engagements! Naturally, I accepted. Then I asked a friend of mine who does voice over here to record me and coach me on it and he agreed without hesitation.

All this plus I have a full schedule of clients…about half business coaching and half naming and branding.

After spending 2009 giving every dime I made to my lawyer to break away from my former business partner, I can say that I have now far surpassed that pay out and am actually in the flow once again—but beyond where I’ve ever been before.

Barbara, every day I’m so honored to pass along to my clients all the insights I’ve learned from you about creating a business that’s right for them. It’s stunning how the smallest tweaks to their thinking push them forward in big ways.

And I’m so aware right now of the foundation you helped me build for how I want to work, the fun I want to have and how beneficial that has been to me. Especially when I see and hear from so many others who are struggling against what’s good for them and what they think they’re supposed to do to build a business.

One thing I think that is so key here is that A.) I have a good foundation of entrepreneurial thinking from absorbing myself in it for years — a foundation that is for working and for living, and B.) therefore making that one change was much easier and felt worth trying even if it wasn’t the answer.

Instead of wallowing in feeling bad or not making progress and isolating myself from people, I started asking questions and telling people how I felt. That landed me in front of the right resource at the right time.

I know have a whole new understanding of how the food we eat affects our energy and the energy we have affects our businesses both in what we can bring in and what we can put out. Changing my energy and my health has directly contributed to my new successes.

If you haven’t had the pleasure of getting to know Alice Barry yourself, pay a visit to her Website  Entertaining the Idea. And if you’re in the area, join Alice and me on May 12 & 13 in Minneapolis for two days of Energize Your Entrepreneurial Spirit.

 

IdeaStarter #12 Catch the Virus

Think about an older person that you know, one you would describe as youthful. What’s the distinguishing characteristic of this lively elder? I’m guessing that curiosity about anything and everything is what stands out.

It’s the same quality that makes for successful entrepreneurship. We need to be curious about our own industry, of course, but we need to be equally curious about things that seem to have no direct bearing on what we’re up to. After all, the world is full of people who are crazy about things we know nothing about  and discovering what they love can make our lives richer.

One Thanksgiving, I had dinner with a group of relatives I didn’t know very well. The sister of the hostess sat next to me at dinner and the moment she sat down announced, “I want to have my own business.” I asked her if she knew what she wanted to do and she lit right up. “I love doing beadwork. I come home from my job and go right to my project room and bead all night,” she told me. The moment dinner was over, she whipped out her beads and spent the afternoon making jewelry. It was fascinating to watch her work and her joy was visible.

A few minutes later, my cousin Ray came over to visit with me. Ray has been a farmer his entire life raising corn and soybeans. A few years ago, he turned several acres of his farm into vineyards—an unusual crop in Minnesota. In his second year of production, his crop outperformed all expectations. He was so excited about this new aspect of his business and had a list of ideas for building it. I couldn’t wait to return in the summer to see his vines.

Even though I may never take up beading or growing grapes myself, being with these enthusiastic folks who were eager to bring their ideas to life was not only fun, their creative energy was downright contagious. I spent my long drive home stopping to write down ideas for my own business.

British author C.S. Lewis obviously understood the Idea Virus. He said, “Good things as well as bad are caught by a kind of infection. If you want to get warm you must stand near the fire; if you want to get wet you must get into the water. If you want joy, peace eternal life, you must get close to, or  even into  the thing that has them. They are a great fountain of energy and beauty spurting up at the very center of reality.  If you are close to it, the spray will wet you ; if you are not, you will remain dry.”

$100 Hour: Find a way to get paid to do something you usually pay to do. Love dining out? Sign up to be a mystery diner and enjoy dinner out in exchange for evaluating the service, food, etc. Love the symphony? Volunteer to be an usher. There are endless possibilities if you are willing to investigate.

Explore More:  Need some help brainstorming or clarifying an idea? Alice Barry, is a gifted Idea Artisan who spreads the Idea Virus wherever she goes. In the words of one of her happy clients, “She helped me to see and clarify a fuzzy picture of myself, who I want to be and  what I want to do.  She also helped me to see clearly how much I have already accomplished and gave me suggestions how to continue to build on this foundation.” If you need some idea-building assistance, a telephone consultation with Alice could get you moving forward.

An idea can turn to dust or magic…depending on the talent that rubs against it. ~ William Bernback