I am not a huge fan of making resolutions on January 1, but I am a huge fan of resolving, so I usually end up setting some sort of yearly goal. This year, I didn’t really set a SMART goal. Instead I just sort of vaguely thought, “I  need to do better at everything,” with everything including running more often, marketing more efficiently, visiting with friends regularly, and probably most importantly, cleaning at least now and then.

A surprising thing has happened. Despite the lack of a defined goal, I have been superduper busy. The kind of busy where you occasionally forget to eat. The first week of the year, several past clients got in touch with new orders, and a few referrals metaphorically knocked on my door. My invoices for the month of January were double my best month of 2011.

When I realized that January was the best month ever for Smiling Tree Writing, I was shocked.  The last quarter of 2011

was terrible. Both my father-in-law and my grandfather were diagnosed with terminal illnesses, suffered rapid declines in health and passed away during that time. From August until December, my life was about family, terminal illness and grief. In many ways, just living felt like a slow, tortuous climb.

Luckily, my three longest-term clients were understanding and I was able to continue working with them, but pretty much everything else business-related was put on hold. As a client once told me, “Personal turmoil is never good for your business.”  I didn’t do any in-person networking, participated only in the most minimal way in social networking, sent no query emails or letters, certainly made no cold calls, and fully expected to more or less start from scratch in January.

You can imagine my surprise when my accountant handed me the numbers for 2011 and I found that my income from writing had almost tripled it was in 2010. You may be imagining now that I am getting close to that fabled “six figure income from writing at home!” That is so far from the truth it’s embarrassing -BUT! Holy moly! My business was growing, even with all the difficulties of 2011. Who knew? I certainly didn’t.

Things are settling down, and I am once more marketing and networking and query-ing. Oh, and posting on this blog, which has been sadly neglected for a month. A few others have reported being similarly busy in January. What about you? Have you experienced a noticeable increase in your workload so far in 2012? 

 

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Yesterday, I started writing a post to put right here. It was about all those posts that instruct us to be amazing, epic or otherwise phenomenal, and how they make me feel. You know the ones I’m talking about – they encourage ust to go out and do big things, to change the world, to make a difference. They always include some examples to inspire and to demonstrate that it’s possible, if you’re willing to sacrifice enough and to follow your dreams with enough dedication.

 

Writing it brought me to the realization that I prefer stories that are amazing on a personal scale. I like knowing about people who change their own worlds, whether the rest of us know about it or not. “Average” people put forth Hurculean efforts just to get by, and those stories are special, too.

 

People who give up jobs to care for aging parents may not be doing something that the rest of the world stands up and applauds, but you can bet that, to the parent being cared for, the sacrifice is huge. Contributing food to a shelter might not be worthy of the national news, but for the person who gets to eat dinner, it’s plenty important.  Overcoming addiction or losing weight or getting a higher education are the most personal kinds of accomplishments, but for the individuals who do those things, the world becomes a different place and thus, they have “made a difference.”

 

Have you saved a stray kitten recently? Provided dinner for a neighbor? Loaned a friend $10? Contributed to a charity? Donated blood? Complimented a stranger? Let someone go first in line at the store?

 

Everyday kind gestures and actions might not rock the world on a grand scale, but they do make a difference. Good deeds on a small scale deserve recognition and appreciation. Leave a comment and tell us about something small you’ve done or observed lately and let us applaud it.

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Several months ago, my daughter’s beloved Dachshund  died. Her name was Babe and she and my daughter were best friends. Babe was supposed to have been my dog, but it was love at first sight for Babe and Stevie. We were never sure exactly how old Babe was because she was given to us by a friend, who got her from someone else, who’d gotten her

from an old lady, who’d gotten her from the pound.

 

Babe was always a stinky dog, and she got stinkier with age. It took me years to house train her, and even then she hated to go outside if it was cold or rainy. In other words, she was quite a lot of work. She was worth it though, because she was loyal and sweet. Babe lived with us for about 12 years.

 

Stevie, of course, was devastated. She almost immediately started reading ads on craigslist, saying that she didn’t really want another dog, but liked reading the ads and looking at the pictures. Her younger sister, Jodi, was sure that Stevie needed another dog right away, so she also started reading classifieds and breed descriptions and thinking about what kind of dog Stevie should have.

 

Eventually, of course, they read an ad they couldn’t resist because they are soft-hearted teenage girls. It was an ad for a poodle that had been rescued. They decided to just “go check it out.” Right. They came home with the funniest looking poodle I have ever seen. She was mostly blond, with a black tail, black ears and just enough black on her nose to make it look huge. The rescuer had been calling her Dawn and Stevie promptly renamed her Sparkles, which she answered to immediately.

 

Sparkles didn’t have any teeth, and had apparently never had too much affection. I petted her a little and she became very attached – like wouldn’t get more than about a foot away from me. At first, I tried to ignore her, in the hopes she would become attached to Stevie, but Stevie is rarely home and left for Bonnaroo a week after bringing Sparkles home.

 

So Sparkles became my dog. I’ve had lots of dogs, but never one who was quite so attached as Sparkles. She cried when

I left the house and slept by the door until I came back home. She slept under my desk all day and sat with me in the evenings. One day, she got covered in grass trimmings and was completely green because she followed me while I was weed-eating. When she went out she usually walked to the driveway, did her business and came back to the door. She didn’t seem to have any desire to run around and explore.

 

Yesterday, my husband came home for lunch and let her out, (I didn’t realize she was outside) and we haven’t seen her since. I’m sure that she wandered down the driveway, then got lost and confused. I’ve walked up and down the road looking for her and have asked a couple of neighbors if they saw here, and still have some hope that we will find her. She couldn’t have gotten too far. We will post lost dog signs this afternoon and ask the rest of the neighbors if they have seen her.

 

Thinking about Sparkles wandering around in the world lost got me to thinking about being lost – and finding your way – in all sorts of situations. Whether you are lost in life, lost for a minute, or you’ve lost direction professionally, just the sensation of not knowing the way is scary. (Poor Sparkles!)

 

If you are feeling lost in your business it is especially scary because (usually) your business is your livelihood. Plus, you want to appear confident to your clients, customers and competitors, right? You don’t want the world to know you’re lost. So, you try to hold your head up with a bright, happy smile and at least try to appear to know where you are going.

 

Sometimes projecting confidence is all it takes to get you headed in the right direction. Sometimes you need a map – a to do list or a business plan or an evaluation by a professional – to help you find your way. The important thing is to acknowledge your lost feeling, then do something about it. If you let yourself get too far off track, you might not find your way back.

 

I find that constant evaluation works best for me. Setting up a plan, then revisiting every month or quarter simply doesn’t work. I need to look at it everyday, sometimes multiple times a day, and ask myself, “Is what you are doing right now part of the plan? Are you getting closer to your goals?” Other people are able to head in the general right direction and get where they want to be without such rigid adherence to a written plan.

 

I need to go now, and make some signs that might help Sparkles find her way home, but I’d love to know: What do you do when you feel lost? Are you a go-with-the-flow kind of person or do you need a set of accurate directions?

 

 

 

 

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Most people have stretches of time where they just feel a little bit off. My daughter says she just doesn’t feel “top of the line” sometimes. Not exactly sick, or even really tired, but somewhere below A-OK.

Maybe these lows are predictable for you. Maybe you feel down every year on some important date, or maybe you feel the Christmas blues. In some ways if you can predict it, it’s better because you are mentally prepared to feel less than optimal.

For me, these spells are usually surprises. Sometimes, but not always, after an argument with a friend or, even worse, my husband or kids I will feel a drag. Even if the conflict gets settled, it still usually makes me feel a little gray the next day, or even for a few days. Sometimes, it happens for no apparent reason, and I drive myself nutty trying to figure out what’s going on. It’s like a slight pull on my thoughts, giving everything in my head a slightly negative twist.

The drag might last for a few hours, a few days or even a few weeks. When it stretches to a few weeks I start to wonder, and start hoping to wake up feeling like my normal self.

Of course, there are all sorts of ways to counteract the drag. I’ve written about most of them on this blog at one time or another, but applying what you know is tough in the middle of an emotional downturn. Plus, it’s easier to justify your poor choices when you’re feeling blue – “I’m not going to run today because my head hurts and I just feel so tired. It’ll be better tomorrow and I’ll run then.”

The thing that saves me is that I always expect the weighted-down days to end. I go to bed each night expecting to wake up feeling better the next day.  Hoping isn’t the right word because “hope” implies it might not happen, and I know that some day, I will feel better.  Maybe that’s the difference in clinical depression and a case of the blues.

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When I hear news about the economy improving and “beginning to show signs of growth” I get a little worried.  Of course, people getting jobs = good news, but constant growth cannot be a good thing.  What else do we want to grow forever?  Maybe instead of focusing on a growing economy we should start focusing on an economy that helps people find their own definitions of success.

Many of us have known for a long time that “traditional” jobs don’t offer the same upside they used to. Not many people expect to have the same job for 20 or even 10 years, and some folks who thought they would have found out recently they won’t.

Besides the glaring lack of stability, working for a company no longer guarantees health insurance coverage, or regular raises or vacation time.  Without those benefits, the appeal of working for someone else wanes.  Of course, it’s nice to have co-workers and someone to blame problems on but all too often a “regular job” is not what you love to do.   Figuring out what you love to do is tough but so is working for a boss at a job you don’t really like.

A story about someone who gets laid off, has to earn money somehow so starts doing something they love is always inspiring.  I heard a story about a woman who got laid off and started sewing fashionable clothes for breastfeeding and ended up with a thriving business, another about about a journalist who lost her job and decided to go to culinary school and fulfill a dream.  Circumstances sometimes force people to do what they love, even when it’s scary and the situation is less than ideal.

I really enjoy Colleen Wainwright’s blog, Communicatrix, and this just hits the spot:

These are crazy times, dear friend. Crazy and fabulous. If you have yet to cast off the shackles of “normal,” fat times, I offer you my somewhat rusty key (and an axe and bottle of whisky, should you have to free yourself the hard way) and say, “Have at it!”

The more of us who figure out how to do what we love, who find a way to make a living without depending on a boss or a corporation the more likely it is we will end up with that mythical sustainable economy.  Maybe it’s naive to hope for a phoenix from the ashes.  Or, maybe it’s time for a whole new kind of revolution.

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