Sunflower Celebration: Day 11

Happy Memorial Day. I am grateful for the time to pause and remember.

My Dad’s uncle Larry served and died in World War II. It was my grandma’s baby brother and she never stopped telling us his story.

My Nephew was a member of the national guard who was deployed to Iraq. He met his wife because her fiancee was serving in Iraq and was killed in action.

My cousin had a son serving in the Navy who died six weeks ago in a tragic accident.

Even for those of us who do not have immediate family serving, we know and love those who do have family members who have served and given their lives.

I am grateful for a day to stop and think and thank. Happy Memorial Day.

Sunflower Celebration: Day 8

Sunflower Celebration: Day 8

Sunflower Celebration: Day 8

Relections on the first week. My personal growth for this celebration is about my relationship with marketing and social media in my life coach business. I want to create a business I love to work in. Marketing hasn’t been my favorite. I thought I was a master marketer in my Scrapbook Store business, which hasn’t been the case now. Usually I spend hours and days agonizing over what I could write that is interesting or where I should post, or being afraid to hit the live button. My goal is to spend no more than three hours a week, one day a month and a weekend every quarter on all my marketing and to do it in a way that is fun, joyful and I look forward to every day.

What a change in just one week. Yesterday was a revelation. It was a Wednesday, I don’t have clients on Wednesday right now so I usually do some “client getting activities”. Blog posts, emails, networking with other coaches. I work all day and usually feel tired, drained and like I haven’t gotten anything done that mattered. This week was a delight. At 10:30 AM I have finished all my work for the day and didn’t know what to do with myself. I did dishes, gardened and then decided I needed a new hobby if I was going to have so much extra time in my week. Then I called my daughter, who is on vacation this week, and chatted for a full hour +. We haven’t done that in a long time. I can’t believe what a difference just asking myself how I can enjoy this task and make it a little more fun made. I can’t wait to see what happens in the next 92 days.

Sunflower Celebration

Sunflower Festival

100 days from now is Friday, August 27th. It will be a special day for me, and for you I hope. In 100 days I am celebrating my Sunflower Festival Project. It’s a whole bunch of ideas that I squished together into a party. It started when I vacationed in Texas in April and went to Wild Seed Farms and picked up a couple of packages of sunflowers and found a couple more packages left over at my house from last year. The idea of a homegrown sunflower festival was born. The farms around my home have sunflower festivals each year, they charge $15 to let you walk around their sunflowers, take photos, buy fair food, and enjoy the music. Each year I decide to plant a few sunflowers and enjoy them on my own. This year I wondered if I could start 100 seedlings inside and get them all planted outside. That’s all that it took, my sunflower project was born.

For me my sunflower project is a social media transformation in 100 days. I was already doing a marketing challenge for my coaching business that included 100 posts in 30 days. That’s where I squished things together. I was really excited about the sunflowers and was also trying to be excited about the marketing challenge. I wondered how I could put the two together and create a whole new approach to social media marketing for me. I have a vision of a calmer, clearer, happier me when it comes to social media. I can see her in my mind’s eye, myself in 100 days, a woman who is confident using social media because she decided to make it fun, consistent, and easy.

I’m inviting you to participate too! What would you like to do in the next 100 days to make a change in your life? It can be anything, improve a relationship, learn a new skill, organize your house. Just write it down and then start envisioning yourself having completed your project. Can you see yourself? Can you imagine how you will feel? It’s not easy to picture the future, but envisioning it is one of the keys to doing it.

If you can’t imagine your changed self, don’t despair, I would love to help. Reach out to me, we will have a Zoom visit and create your vision and map out your plan.

On August 27th. I will host a celebration from my back yard – and you can celebrate too!
It can be life changing, and you can do it! Let’s get started.

Create Your Own Sunflower Celebration

I am creating a sunflower celebration summer. I decided to plant sunflowers all over my yard, take care of them, watch them grown and then celebrate with a party.

sunflower celebration

I did it because I had another project I was working on and it seemed so hard, I needed some sunny sunflowers to support it.  Each step to grow sunflowers mirrors the steps that I need to take in my other project, which is to become proficient in my social media while enjoying the process.

Know what you want – people get hung up on this one all the time. They say something like, “I want to get better at social media”.  It’s too vague. You can’t create actions to support it. You can’t measure it.  You won’t even know when you get there.  Choose one specific goal. It can have several steps, but you want just one goal.

Create a vision – It was so easy to create the vision of the sunflower celebration. I know what sunflowers look like, I know what type of seeds I bought, I know where I am planting them.  I can see the vision of three rows of sunflowers blooming, with tall ones in the back, five-foot flowers blooming in the middle and cute little teddy bear sunflowers with their ruffly blooms blooming in the front.  Having that vision made it really easy to plant to it.  Creating a vision isn’t always easy, but if you break down exactly what you want, you can start seeing what you want to create.  Creating the vision helps you see the actions you need to take.

Consistent action – To get any project done you need to take action. Your actions need to be chosen with your end in mind.  What are the next actions that that will get you to where you want to goal? Do them and then do the next steps.  An important part of your actions is to make them consistent. If you do a whole bunch of things in a flurry and then put off the next steps until you have another burst of energy and activity, you eventually burn out and quit. 

Measure progress – It is so gratifying to know that you are making progress.  It keeps your goal front and center, and it helps you know whether you need to work harder or if you are on target.

Celebrate successes – Take a page from Mary Poppins, “in every job that must be done there is an element of fun. You find the fun and SNAP the job’s a game” Celebrating is that element of fun that makes is a game and not work.

Keep going – don’t quit.

I’m inviting you to join me in creating your own sunflower celebration project this summer. I am willing to help you with your goal, your vision and mapping out your actions. Reach out to me, I would love to help you celebrate your summer, you might even want to plant a couple of sunflowers.

Tulip to Iris – Moving Past the Transitions in Our Life

Tulips and Iris

This morning on my walk I passed a house where the tulips had just finished blooming, and the iris were budded next to them, not yet ready to bloom. I was having a mental conversation with the tulips.

“I bet it’s embarrassing to be hanging out there with your blooms faded and your petals falling off.”

“It’s like you’re saying, “Hey, look at me, I’m a mess.”

“I bet it feels awkward and conspicuous.”

“I bet you feel really unsightly.”

“I bet you wish I would stop staring at you.”

We are in transition in our yards here in the Pacific Northwest.  The spring flowers just finished and the early summer flowers have not started to bloom yet.  The spent flowers and the leaves are messy and not very attractive. 

That’s how our lives are sometimes.  Transitions are always a little awkward. We go from a life that we are familiar with to one that is new to us and unfamiliar.

Some transitions come in order and we expect them. That would be like going to college, getting married and starting a family. Some transitions are unexpected like the early death of a spouse or raising your children in the church to have them leave home and leave their faith behind.

How are you supposed to be a widow when you were just getting good at being a wife?

How do you stay close to your children when their lives aren’t anything like you thought they would be – all the milestones have changed?

We see the messiness in our life during a transition. We feel conspicuous, like we’re the only one doing this and everyone is staring at us.

What we often can’t see is that right behind the phase of life we are finishing is another beautiful life just waiting to get going.  It’s not the same as the life we just left and, unlike the flowers that bloom in succession without missing a beat, we often must get used to and even practice the new life. 

I can help you in your transitions – when you work with me, we laugh together, we cry together, we practice new ways to flourish when our life doesn’t follow the path that we thought it would.

I bet you think it would be nice to have someone alongside you who has done this before.

It is nice.  Let’s talk.