Just had a “Cousins’ Day” with a favorite cousin of mine where she or I will travel to one another’s respective neck of the woods and simply spend the day knocking around town, always beginning with breakfast. Well, in our reporting out, I told her how I have been going through another cycle of feeling like I’ve been working too hard for too long and that there HAS got to be an easier way. I’ve been looking for answers (contracting more, streamlining, even considering network marketing models) and all the while I am burning myself out. This week, I took off four consecutive evenings from working on my business; this is a lot for me and the current workload. I wonder if it’s the holidays (alt. holi-daze) that begins this cycle of discontent? As in, take a break for a few days and now it’s a matter of “objects at rest tend to stay at rest?”
This is the second year in a row I have really had a “come to Jesus” meeting with my entrepreneurial efforts. Last year, I put things down long enough to start a whole new company as I simultaneously began negotiations with a strategic partner/competitor/friend of mine for him to take over my web business. It only took a month or two and the feeling passed, but in those two months, I started a new company in a new industry. Though it’s still active as a small renewable energy certificate reseller, the departing flurry of initiative that gave birth to that company has long since let it go adrift.
So, I’m still searching. I’m searching for an easier way–a smarter way. My body needs sleep, after all, and staying up until 1, 2, sometimes 3AM only to get up at 6-6:30AM with the kids so I can go work for The Man is NOT my cup of tea.
But, I chose it, right? Shoot, I choose it every day, apparently. Bugger.
This searching is what led me to Dr. Christopher. I ran into Chemo–a true local icon–one day at a nearby cafe. We exchanged pleasantries and he asked me how business was going. I told him it was going almost too well. Business was (and continues) to come in, hand over fist, and the challenge is not bringing in more–it’s how to properly handle the work we’ve got! He said, “Oh, you’ve got to talk to Dr. Christopher. She’s really good, yaddah, yaddah, yaddah.” He scratched a time, location and the good doctor’s name on a random piece of paper and told me to go to this networking meeting and seek her out. I said thanks, pocketed the info and from there it would be relegated to the bottom of the piles of paperwork that litter my desk at home.
A few months went by and one night, after I finished putting my one year old daughter to bed (she is the youngest of our three kids under five,) my wife called me into our bedroom. She had her tarot cards out and insisted on practicing on me. I went along with it. At one point, near the end of this impromptu reading, she says, “Looks like you’re going to have a mentor… probably a woman… does that ring any bells?” I said no at the time but the only thing that came to mind was that note Chemo gave me. I dug it out of the stack that night and followed up on it the next day. After a couple phone calls, I was scheduled to go to visit a local networking group on the other side of town.
Turns out, Dr. Christopher works with EFT, a.k.a. Emotional Freedom Technique, a method of tapping on the body’s energy medians (think acupuncture without the needles.) She does this with a focus on clearing the blocks we experience in business and in the pursuit of abundance. The meeting ran its course and at the end of it, she approached me and told me we needed to talk. She did not yet know I was there to see her (or, at least, I hadn’t told her this yet.)
It turns out, she is in the process of architecting a business of her own and she is interested in maintaining my web services as a cornerstone in that effort. Of course, I’m wallowing in the gutter of my own burn-out, so she and I are working through that currently.
How goes the search? Maybe the answer is the project Dr. Christopher is working on. Maybe it is a change that occurs in my own business. Maybe it is something altogether new and undiscovered. I don’t know. What I do know is I’m still searching.
I told my cousin all this over breakfast. After we finished eating, we opted to go find a bookstore. Her boss had recommended the popular, out-of-print sales book “Swim With The Sharks Without Being Eaten Alive” by Harvey Mackay. I drove us to the other side of town to a large mall. We could have gone to the one that was only five minutes away, but we didn’t. We trucked all the way across town, wove our way around the mall to the side where the Schuler’s was waiting, and as we pulled into a spot in one of the furthest corners of the parking lot, I gasped, rolled down the window and said, “Dr. Christopher!!” as she was walking to her car. I introduced my cousin, we made a quick hi-g’bye, parted ways and I turned to my cousin and said something along the lines of, “Holy sh!t.” We were both a little stunned at the cosmic implications of what had just happened. I’m still not entirely sure what it means, but you can bet my eyes and ears are open.
As for my cousin’s book hunting, it was fruitless at the mall. Once she told me the title of the sales book had something to do with “swimming with sharks”, I guessed what it was. Turns out, I had an old copy of the very book. I acquired it in a trade for a couple large landscaping rocks (a.k.a. “character rocks”) years ago.
Serendipity all over the place.
