Aspiring, newly minted and experienced entrepreneurs rejoice!  This week I  happily  devoured  a second smart and engaging book to help us lead the life we want.  

In my last post, I ditch Tony Robbins for Chris Guillebeau.  (That was so easy!)  Gurgling about the inspirational messages in Guillebeau’s book, “The ART of Non-Conformity: Set Your, Own Rules, Live the Life You Want and Change the World,”  how can it be that I’m taken by another?

Today, Cindy Solomon’s book moves stage center.  In The Rules of WOO: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Capturing the Hearts & Minds of Today’s Customers  presents a poignant message for business owners who might be thinking, “How in  the world can I leave my business and take a sabbatical?” 

 Guillebeau’s premise states that a small group of people will begin to  take the first steps to build a sustainable lifestyle business doing what they love – for customers who love them right back.  Whether you are taking the first steps or finishing the 10,000th mile , “loyal customers” is the operative phrase for building success as an entrepreneur.

 How do you get customers and clients to love you right back?  Solomon is so much smarter than most of us, lives in the real world and maintains a kick-butt attitude about building a business for the long term. 

Cindy’s not only a  master at meeting customer needs in new ways and sustaining a large customer base but her clients are raving lunatics about her content, insights, and talents as a speaker.  “Cindy, you are the ‘bomb’!!” lovingly expresses a director of learning.   (Hey, I’m a great presenter but no one has ever called me ”the bomb.”)

What does getting customers to love you back  have to do with taking a sabbatical?

Three gems from The Rules of Woo – Rule 7: Run the Business; Don’t Let It Run You

Wobbling about the idea of taking time away from the business?  Working to  establish your manifesto for life and work?  Heed up.

• If you really want to shock yourself, take your To-Do list and note the “tasks” that are unrelated to building the profitability of your company for the long term.
• Rather than approach personal care, wellbeing or individual growth activities as selfish luxuries you need to see them as a vital component of your profitability.
• “Only you” activities deserve a different kind of attention than you have given them in the past; they fuel your personal productivity.

Go, Cindy, Go!  And in the Rules of Woo,  she does – with information, ideas, checklists, and stories you’ll have trouble keeping up with.

About Cindy Solomon:

Cindy Solomon is one of the most sought after leadership and customer loyalty speakers in the country.  Working with clients as diverse as Cisco, Genentech, State Farm Insurance and Microsoft, Cindy brings her irreverent and results-oriented take on creating customer and employee loyalty to thousand os leaders every year. 

For more about Cindy Solomon visit www.cindysolomon.com.  And, check out the Photo Gallery, where you’ll  see  how Cindy takes  time away from her business (kayaking in Crete) to fuel the  productivity necessary to sustain and grow a business.

Full disclosure.  Over the last fifteen years as  the recipient of Cindy Solomon’s advice and expertise, my business thinking evolved to high levels of smartness.  Alas,  I’m one of her lunatic fans. 

AARP

Chris Guillebeau has strong opinions about life, work and travel. For two nights, my bedside reading was his book, The Art of Non-Conformity: Set Your Own Rules, Live the Life You Want and Change the World. Instead of putting me in a zen-like mood, I was riled up about making sure I am living the life I want to live.

With many generations to inspire, I hope Chris knows his message is relevant and extremely important, even if one is past the mid-point of life expectancy. Designing your future life with career breaks may give you more of the life you want.  It’s one change toward remarkable.

On page 7, four principles are set forth – if you are interested in being remarkable:

• You Must Be Open to New Ideas
• You Must Be Disssatisfied with the Status Quo
• You Must Be Willing to Take Personal Responsibility
• You Must Be Willing to Work Hard

Tons of Boomers have lived much of their lives and achieved success because they believe in these principles. It’s best we not forget them. Thanks Chris! For reminders, inspiration and tools to live differently – no matter your generation – read this book.

Chris Guillebeau has charmed a large audience of followers. They want his manifesto, “A Brief Guide to World Domination.” And his second one, “279 Days to Overnight Success.”

His movement has a growing follower-base, which he calls his “Small Army.” He is the founder of the Art of Non-Conformity, a project that teaches people how to change the world by achieving significant personal goals (like world domination) and helping others do the same.

Guillebeau’s personal goal is to visit every country in the world by April 7, 2013.  Current status is 149/192.

Bye, Bye Tony Robbins.  Hello Chris Guillebeau!

Guillebeau’s book will be one of the give-aways at Meet, Plan, Go, a national conversation about career breaks, sabbaticals and extended travel, happens in 13 cities on Sept. 14^th.  yourSABBATICAL.com has partnered with REI to present a panel of experts, raise awareness about resources, and create opportunities to meet people who are “stepping out.”  Their stories will inspire and you’ll come away with information you won’t get any place else.

Becoming remarkable – start now.

Like the time I (who walked the straight, narrow and confining path of “good girl”) entered the home of my parents while they were away camping to find my younger brother rolling joints at the kitchen table.

What are YOU doing?!!!!

What does it look like?

Get that out of here! NOW!

To me, drama is the anticipation of a large scale emotional upheaval.  My present drama drip feels like the moment you see someone who did you wrong in high school start sauntering across the room at the pre-reunion party looking like they are going to hug and kiss you. You want to be cordial and nice; but at the same time you still hate him and/or want to pull her hair out.

Then there was the time I tapped the shoulder of my 12 year-old daughter who was in an off-limits arcade when she was supposed to be at the skating rink. (She tipped me off when she forgot to take her skates.  Duh.)

Let’s go, Elizabeth.

Uh oh. Am I grounded?

Actually, no. But I am taking away your hair dryer, favorite jeans and those two little Polo shirts you love.

When drama is coming, we have two choices – competing emotions, one appearing more enjoyable than the other. Which one deserves more energy? Which one will win out? Can you do nice/hate at the same time?

After years of normalcy, drama entered my life last Tuesday night, wedging herself beside me in my Knoll Bulldog chair. I was reviewing the invitation list for a November post-wedding celebration when assisted living called to tell me my 94-year old father was on his way to the ER with the paramedics.

Synopsis and state of my inner emotional life:

My only child is getting married next month. JOY

My 94-year old father is failing fast. SORROW

Now, normal days are gone. I’ve given up trying to assign a full stint of a day to any one thing.  (Such as 4 days working; 1 day for dad immersed in the final chapter of life; 1 day full of joy for a new chapter in Elizabeth’s life; 1 day to brood about everything.)

Now I just divvy up hours.  4 hours at ICU when they’ll let me visit to hold my dad’s hand; 1 hour learning to navigate the land of healthcare; 1 hour for finding the right pants to complete my husband’s wedding day outfit; 3 hours for work; 2 hours tracking down circles of just-the-perfect color of tulle to hold the birdseed for wedding guests to shower on the bride and groom; 2 hours doing a food tasting of sushi for the November party.

There’s no shouting in this drama, only a loud internal dialogue during which I lament the coming of these two events at the same time.

Too quickly I move to solution. I’ll find a place between the feelings of joy and those of sorrow – a place to retreat and numb myself against two competing strong emotions.  A safe place; a place to help me survive.  I congratulated myself on the idea even as I was unsure how to execute it.

About 10AM this morning, something changed my mind.

I entered the ICU waiting room after being allowed a 15-minute visit with my dad, and the first thing I saw on one of the chairs (as if waiting for me) is the September edition of Bride’s Magazine. Someone mocks me, I think. But, I smiled.

Picking up the magazine, I realize my solution should be to fully embrace all that life is giving me, not to find middle ground to steel myself away.

Could what seems like drama really be two seemingly different experiences inherent in my life but joining up purposely? To be embraced simultaneously rather than separately? To be felt together rather than choosing one over the other?

Marriage and Death – Each has joy – for a shared life beginning and a final chapter in a long well-live life.  Each has sorrow – sharing one’s only child after years together and losing a final parent.

If you see someone sitting in an ICU waiting room thumbing through a Bride’s Magazine’s, that’s me full of joy and sorrow.  It’s my lesson to be learned, before possible full-scale drama pours forth.

Perhaps, there’s something in this story for you. Maybe not now but later – when drama visits you.  Meanwhile, enjoy the normalcy of your life.

“We’re moving from a conspicuous consumption – which is ‘buy without regard’ – to a ‘calculated consumption,’” says Marshal Cohen, an analyst at the NPD Group, a retailing research and consulting firm.

One of the key practices along these lines is that “experiences” trump “material objects.” This latest round of research is all about emotional efficiency:  how to reap the most happiness for your dollar.

While scholars and researcher haven’t determined whether Armani will make you smile more than Jason Wu, they have found that our types of purchases, their size and frequency and even the timing of the spending all affect long-term happiness.

The major finding is that spending money for an “unusual” experience – a Spanish immersion, a Yellowstone wolf-tracking trek, cooking lessons in Crete, or working with a medical relief team in Haiti – produces longer-lasting satisfaction than spending money on a trip to eat low-country cuisine in Charleston, South Carolina. (No offense, Charlestonians.)

The new research supports the idea of  sabbaticals as experiences that will contribute more than rejuvenation – but the elusive long-term happiness. And doing something unusual?  You’d be surprised how many ordinary ideas for what to do on a sabbatical can  stretch, and expand into extraordinary sabbatical experiences.

So wear a ball cap. Negotiate a sabbatical in your present job or your new one. Then, do something unusual during that career break. You’ll redeem happiness for every dollar spent.

Reminder: To kick start your sabbatical planning, attend a Meet, Plan, Go! event in one of 13 cities, including Atlanta, where we’re hosts. Sign up! It’s free.

“… be warned that you are diving into a movie with the spiritual and emotional depth of a birdbath.” - St. Louis Suburban Journal.

“A bloated monster of a movie. … gargantuan running time.” - Cinema Blend Movie Review

“Superficial. …unlikely to change anyone’s life.” – Los Angeles Times

Though 7 million people enjoyed the book, Eat, Pray, Love was 2^nd at the box office on its debut weekend. Sylvester Stallone’s The Extenders took first place honors.

Regardless of the box office reports and harsh critics, I’ll go to see the movie. The ideas, experiences, and philosophy of author Elizabeth Gilbert align with many of our values at yourSABBATICAL.com. We want everyone to have a break from their job – to have “time out” to call one’s own.

While you contemplate whether or not to go the movie, here’s an exciting  event that you shouldn’t hesitate about. People who’ve discovered Meet, Plan, Go aren’t going to miss the event in their city. In fact, they are signing up for RIGHT NOW!

Meet, Plan, Go, a national conversation about career breaks, sabbaticals and extended travel, happens in 13 cities on Sept. 14^th.  yourSABBATICAL.com has partnered with REI to present a panel of experts, raise awareness about resources, and create opportunities to meet people who are “stepping out.”  Their stories will inspire and you’ll come away with information you won’t get any place else.

Find the city near you and register. The event is free but seating is limited. And check out those grand prizes and give-aways. Fantabulous.

Stay tuned for panelist bios, topics to be covered, and more news on Meet, Plan, Go. And if you’ve seen Eat, Pray, Love, care to tell me whatchathink?

Not until I got to the last page of the mid-July issue of the The New York Times Book Review.   There, an essay by Gary Shteyngart titled “Only Disconnect” poured forth the real life dilemma of our techno-world.  The writing is brilliant. It is a prose poem.

Since sabbaticals and career breaks call on us to “disconnect,” I strongly suggest you read it. Don’t skim. Relish the writing and savor the message.

Mr. Shteyngart’s purchase of an iPhone from a “curly-haired, 20-something Apple Store glam-nerd” described by him below has an undercurrent of uneasy reality and his transformed world likely resembles yours and …. (self-disclosure) mine.

“This right here, is the most important purchase you will ever make in your life.”  He looked at me, trying to gauge whether the holiness of this moment had registered as he passed me the Eucharist with two firm, unblemished hands.  “For real?” I said trying to sound like a teenager….”For real,” he said.  And he was right.  The device came out of the box and my world was transformed.

The perils of connectivity are many including your future kindness, charity, compassion and sympathy.

“With each passing year, scientists estimate that I lose between 6 and 8 percent of my humanity,” Mr Shteyngart writes. “By the first quarter of 2020 you will be able to understand who I am through a set of metrics as simple as those used to measure the torque of the latest-model Audi or the spring of some brave new toaster.”

His annual summertime departure from NYC (he ventures upstate) and the ensuing loss of a cell signal begins the rediscovery that causes Shteyngart to “wake up from the techno-fugue state and remember who I am.”

In sharing Mr. Shteyngart’s talents, I hope to move you off the dime of your current thinking and into taking action – remembering who you are and how you want to live.

Mr.  Shteyngart is a humorist whose novels mix timeless eastern-European dread with a more contemporary sense of absurdity. To help promote his new book, “Super Sad True Love Story” (whose trailer has been  heralded), he recently delivered a one-two punch in the New York Times, first in an interview with Deborah Solomon in the magazine, and then on the back page of the Sunday Book Review with an essay, “Only Disconnect”, about the perils of connectivity.

Try something new. Learning something in a new place can be more relaxing and refreshing than trying to do nothing. While it’s good to get outside your comfort zone, it’s not necessary to explode out of it. “I don’t want to go bungee jumping,” says Matthew Edlund, a sleep expert in Sarasota, Fla., and author of “The Power of Rest” who says he’d much prefer walking through Berlin or Beijing. “You decide what your level of adventurousness is and do it.

My level of adventure was to schedule a lesson to learn to YOLO. (It’s a new verb.)  YOLO as in “You Only Live Once” – That’s what it’s called, because a small company located in Destin, FL has done very good work on their brand.  Here you don’t go “stand up paddle boarding”; you go YOLOing.

Elizabeth, my daughter and business partner, and I  carved out this Thursday afternoon beginning at 2 pm. We deemed that space on our calendars as sacred and scheduled all our business around it. We could easily have filled it in with a conference call.  We didn’t.

On Eastern Lake, a couple of miles west of Seagrove Beach, we met up with Tom, owner of Yolo and our teacher for the next hour.  I didn’t explode out of my comfort zone (it was a calm day and we were on a lake) but I was challenged.  Age had nothing to do with it.  Elizabeth found it challenging too!

Here’s how trying something new worked to detach me from the office for an afternoon.

1. Carrying any electronic device is impossible because you might fall off the board into the water.  Bad for your Blackberry.  Conclusion?  Literally, you won’t be able to take a call, text or read your email for 2 hours.
2. Thinking about strategy for the business or what work challenges are for the next day?  Forget it.  You are glued to how you are going to stay on that board.  Although falling off wouldn’t be all that bad since it’s hot, it’s not too cool looking.  And no matter what your age, ingrained into every subconscious is the desire to look cool.  In-voluntarilary ending up in the water is a no, no no.
3. Talking about business.  Nope.  Any conversation is around “upwind,” “downwind” “when to tack” “how to turn.”  Once on the board and doing pretty good, the response to any suggestion from Tom (i.e., if you just step around and turn sideways like a surfer, you can have a little different experience going down wind) is “Yeah right, Tom.” You do not want to move my feet even though they are tingling from the stress of clutching to the board.
4. Any extra brain power focuses on physical needs.  While the brain is figuring out why you have placed your body on this slip of a board and want to stay balanced there as well as move through the water, certain physical needs reign and occupy your mind as well as any conversations you have:

I’m hot.

I’m thirsty.

Get your board away from my board.

I have to go to the bathroom.

We topped the evening off with another first.  Thai at Daddy’s Bar-Be-Que in Ft. Walton – another first.  I had heard good things about their lemon grass soup and always wanted to stop here.  Under the sign pictured left, a plastic streamer strung to two trees says, “Thai.”

Elizabeth was game but remarked as I pulled into the drive way, “this place looks scary.”  It’s a real true shack. There were no customers there at 7pm and that was a little disconcerting.

But, of course, you know the ending.  Best Thai food we ever had!

So find a couple of hours on your calendar, try something new and I promise you’ll be in rare form – refocused and energized – for attacking work the next day.

With financial security comes freedom. Maybe that freedom is in the form of a relaxed period of “Golden Years”, when you finally get to do some of things you’ve longed to do but couldn’t (because you were working). Maybe freedom is a blow-out sabbatical every now and then. Maybe freedom is working for yourself, so you can run errands and travel whenever you damn well please.

But haven’t you heard? Security is a myth. You could squirrel away 12% of your annual income for 25 years, planning and saving for that day when you’ll retire (freedom), and then a “global economic crisis” hits and POOF . . . there goes freedom.

A well-traveled, independent-minded friend of mine, Julie, has this Helen Keller quote framed in her office, and I remember reading it there several years ago:

“Security is mostly a superstition.  It does not exist in nature,
Nor do the children of men as a whole experience it.  Avoiding
danger is no safer, in the long run than outright exposure.
Life is a daring adventure or nothing at all.”

I work for myself (and with my mother), and relish in the fact that “getting ready for work”, for me, means simply putting on a robe, pouring coffee in my favorite mug, and sitting down to face my computer. But I’ve learned that my independence does not mean “freedom” to the degree that I long for – because I, like everyone else, have to work for security.

And ultimately even Oprah and Bill Gates don’t have security. Death could be at the door tomorrow. It’s a sobering fact.

Maybe freedom really is just another word for nothin’ left to lose. Today, I’m working on re-defining “freedom” for myself. More than the ability to do as I please, when I please, I think it’s about having the peace of mind – the space in my mind – to recognize and cherish the very small moments in my day that bring me joy.

How do you define freedom?

A lifetime, if calculated from week to week, is “simply 168 hours, back to back, repeated again and again,” according to Ms. Vanderkam.  Subtract 56 weekly sleeping hours (eight a night) and 50 for work and you still have 62 unscheduled hours each week.  Husbands and wives talk to each other a mere 12 minutes a day.

So, what in the world are you doing with the rest of the time?

Ms. Vanderkam, a contributor to USA Today and many other publications, suggests you “outsource and automate.”  According to the review in the Wall Street Journal, she herself retains a house cleaner and a laundry pick-up service, buys premarinated meat and prechopped veggies and frozen lunches.  Cooking and cleaning are drudgery in her book.  And she’s also a b-i-g multitasker.  She cross-trained while pregnant.

I have to admire the author for making our time struggles more manageable.  (Catch her blog for more ideas.) After all, it’s not about eternity.  It’s about 62 hours a week.   Can’t you wrestle that into shape and do with it what’s important?  Think harder about where you want that time to go?

The book  is  a cross between Harvard Business Review and Real Simple Magazine according to Joseph Tartakovsky, a contributing book reviewer and student at Fordham Law School, who gives us some of the best advice for a solution to our time woes.

Do less, disconnect, insist on retaining a measure of tranquility – that takes time.

His ideas seem a better road map for 62 hours of unscheduled time than prechopped broccoli.

I’ve experienced several major changes in my life during the last six months, including putting a home I’ve owned for 13 years on the market and moving to another state. I told my friend that I feel as if I am watching my new life from the outside, feeling very disconnected and overwhelmed by all that has changed.

“It’s a very strange feeling, as if I’m peering through a window, observing myself living in my new house,” I said.

“Then you haven’t embraced your new life,” she told me. “You’ve not fully committed yourself to it yet.”

She was right, of course. And I felt rather dull for not having figured that out for myself. It suddenly seemed so obvious.

“And don’t forget, Elizabeth, you are the architect of all this change. You made it happen.”

So today, I am focused on embracing all that is new (and good) and letting go of what was. I made this life of mine, and it’s time to take ownership and move in.