Write Your Will and Start Your Life
Publisher Nance Rosen’s weekly Syndicated Column on PersonalBrandingBlog.com: Write Your Will and Start Your Life.
This is a time for you to have a clear outcome in mind for yourself, your career or business. Part of your brand is who you are, but a more present part of it is: who you are becoming?
In the most volatile times, the person with a clear vision and the plan to achieve it plus the guts to get up every morning and act on it will lead the pack. When you get in your car or take the train, do you take just any route to work or a client call? Serendipity might be a fun strategy on a Sunday if you pack snacks, carry water and wear comfortable shoes, but it’s not the way to make tracks toward a desired destination.
Great athletes start with the finish line in mind. Lance Armstrong doesn’t hop on his bike and wonder where he’ll end up. Michael Phelps doesn’t jump in the pool and paddle around. Why would you take to the open road of your career or business without a destination in mind and expect to wind up in the ideal place?
Read the entire post at the Personal Branding Blog.
When You Don’t Know What Else To Do.
What do you do when you are at odds with yourself? When you have a pile of folders or papers? When you’re almost out of underwear? When you should be doing your taxes? My daughter Molly Jo reads.
Not to infer that her life is out of order (actually the examples are from my own quick inventory of what I’m not doing right now). Just to say that even when I’m at odds with myself, I think about Molly Jo. And that today, leaving Kentucky and going back to New York, she reported that she read a new book, per her airplane ritual. Behavior that is reassuringly contagious.
A few weeks ago, Mo was home with me in LA from Manhattan, for her typical 36-hour turnaround. She has a dozen friends to see and multiple places to go in my new car. She has a tiny wardrobe (size not number of garments), packed like a perfect scoring Tetris level 7 in a chic bag that defies the word backpack and isn’t clumsy like luggage. It’s her…. whatever. In less than two days and four times as many changes, she finally needs to borrow a small dress and a much smaller evening bag.
As her professional dresser (think Gypsy with Rosalind Russell and Natalie Wood), I pick through her outsized teal leather silver studded carryall to select only the essentials to fit into my 4 x 4 (inches, not all wheel drive) vehicle on loan that will be slung on her shoulder. We have few secrets (from each other, not you) so nothing shocks me about her life as represented by the contents in her bag that contains a good bit of it. But, I do look for evidence that nothing has changed, the way she looks at me when we meet at airports.
There it is: the book! It doesn’t matter what book. It’s the book. Typically soft cover, 6 x 9 inches in dimension, as thick as a baby doll’s arm. Later, when she digs through my handbag for a lipstick I’m wearing that she decides she likes, she finds the same proof of life as we live it, just with a different title.
We both write relentlessly, each on nearly a dozen different projects, some for print, some online, some for others and some for ourselves. We both like to hear our writing out loud. I especially like to hear her read her pieces to me on the phone.
She read aloud all the early drafts of my last book, when I pushed her wheelchair through the weather in Kentucky after the accident. I would write when she slept and later when she worked. I can still see her reading in winter, when the words made puffs of smoke while icicles froze on fences made for keeping horses in their places.
My sister once asked me if I liked reading for the same reason she did. She liked the way reading felt when the words ran over her eyes. I do, especially when I don’t know what else to do.
