Fun with Caterpillars

This morning on the way back from a walk, my son spotted a fat green caterpillar slowly making its way across the sidewalk.

I rarely see caterpillars and this one was really cool looking with a little horn.

So I scooped it up and brought it home with us. I then created a little habitat for it using mulch, a stick and some leaves (a quick search on Bing showed our caterpillar is a Lettered Sphinx moth which likes to eat grape and Virginia Creeper leaves).

I’ve put it on my desk to watch it do its thing.

Be cool if it spins a cacoon.

Happy St. Patty’s Day

Connecting with the Hearts of My Customers

One issue that has recently come up for me is around being a member of the “No One Responds to My Offers Club.” I don’t think any of the members really want to be in this club, but there are quite a few of us.

I’m a good writer and writing a decent offer isn’t particularly hard for me. Still, it kind of sucks when I create a class, send an offer and get hardly any responses.

I wondered to myself, “hmm, how am I seeing my customers, and how would I want to be seen if I were a customer?”

I’ve typically seen prospects subscribing to my ezine as:

• Critical, looking for results “right now”
• Judging me as not being “enough” to really be buying anything from me
• Inscrutable – there’s a secret word or code that, if I can figure it out, they’ll click through, otherwise, they’ll keep me guessing.

Hmm. Not exactly ingrediants for a very successful relationship.

So I’ve been considering shifting gears.

One shift in perspective is around, “how can I support and service my customers?”

This shift has been helpful because it takes the focus off of me (How can I get them to do this) and puts the focus back on them and on value.

Talking with my colleague, Hiro Boga, made me aware of another shift that needs to happen: connecting with the hearts of my customers.

This shift goes deeper because until people feel safe enough, they won’t come close enough to allow you to offer value.

So, how to go about enabling this shift?

Much of it is simply being aware of my own fears and vulnerabilities and making space for them. Doing this enables my customers to feel safer to bring their own vulnerabilities to me so they can get the support they need.

Stepping in too quickly as an expert intimidates prospective clients.

The question I have at this point is simply, how can I get myself back into this space. How can I get reconnected with the hearts of my customers?

I guess desire is the first step.

When is It Time to Start Over? (or the little tweed suit that couldn’t)

sometimes, no matter how good the material, no matter what the potential, it just isn’t worth the investment to fix something up.

Sometimes it makes more sense to simply get something that is perfect or close to perfect. Or to get rid of what isn’t working and replace it with something that does.

You are Everything and You are Nothing

Passage read today in Music of the Soul. Took a little processing for this to make sense to me. It seems impossible to be both.Yet from an intuitive place it makes a lot of sense. My heart understands this to mean with God, we are everything. Without God we are nothing.

I was reading an article, later watching a short newscast about Bernie Madoff, the guy who created hundreds of cascading Ponzi schemes that thousands of people including large national banks invested into. It was fascinating to read about it because it brings up so many questions:

• Why did Madoff do it to begin with? He had genuine talent and intelligence and had already made millions through legal activities.
• Why did investors fall for his schemes. The majority were not stupid people. Many were supposedly sophisticated investors.
• What does this say about human beings in general?

I think so much of this has to do with our fundamental state of neediness. We live in a time that allows us to be more self-sufficient than anytime in human history. We have jobs that allow us to get all of our necessities, if we need to do something we can’t do ourselves, we can hire someone else, we can stay in our house and be entertained, have companionship, etc.

But it means we rarely need to reach out and say “Help, I can’t do this myself.” But one need that can’t get met no matter how much power and money we have is the need for connection with God. Or at least with something that is clearly larger than ourselves.

When I (really anyone) tries to get this need met through money, through power, through human connection, they fail. And our egos tells us we just need to try harder and get more. But you can never get enough. It’s futile.

The Sufis say we get this need met by coming to God with complete humility. To say “only You Beloved can reach my heart and give it what it yearns for.”

In the world, it plays out over and over: wanting to feel like we matter through everything except by doing the one thing that will take care of that need.

The last thing I want to do is to make it sound like I have this down pat. I’m human and I think by nature I have to constantly make the decision to bring myself to the Divine rather than to do it on my own, to even think another person can do it for me.

Living in the Material World: Part 1

The other day my family and I drove to another Denver neighborhood to walk around and take in new sights.

The neighborhood we ended up in was the Highlands neighborhood which is just west of downtown Denver. The name comes from the fact that it is on a ridge overlooking the Platte river (the river is still there but it’s entirely blotted out by the modern river that is I-25).

Millionaires and rich merchants once built red limestone mansions in Highlands. Then the neighborhood went into a decline and small, decrepit homes stretch to the north along with hideous mid-60’s and 70’s government offices.

The money is back and expensive new homes are going up along with expensive condominium developments.

Highlands is a western expansion of “Confluence Park” which is the neighborhood immediately to the east of I-25 and the Platte river. When we first moved to Denver in 1999, this area was gritty and run down. It was way too urban for most people.

Then an REI store moved into an old manufacturing building and several buildings were scraped out and rehabbed. Then the rush was on and condominiums and dot.com offices spaces sprouted up like mad.

When we walked around confluence park it was like a magazine spread for the “young, urban, lifestyle.” 20-somethings playing frisbee and wearing hip active gear. Golden Retrievers and Black Labs frolicking through the park. Moms with jogging strollers decked out like armored tanks speed walking and talking on cell phones.

It was depressing as hell.

My husband commented that there’s something weird about these pre-fabbed neighborhoods which certainly describes Confluence Park. They’re nice enough looking but at the same time there’s something calculated and sterile about them. Highlands is slightly better because there was an actual neighborhood (even though at the time millionaires built those red stone mansions it was probably pretty sterile and desolate looking as well).

Will the place look for organic and natural 25 years from now? It’s hard to predict how the neighborhood will evolve. Right now, I’d rather go somewhere else.

I can’t hardly wait!

Ooh! The Design Within Reach 2008 catalog is coming soon. If you love classic modern design (I grew up with Danish modern) like me, this book is a delight to browse through and full of groovy ideas.

Things that Changed My Life Forever (in a good way)

These are people, ideas, and things that changed my life in a positive way. I could never be the same person I was before after I was exposed to them:

• What Color is Your Parachute? I first read this book when I was 22 and fresh out of college with barely a clue about what I could do to get a job. I never again, ever looked at job seeking and careers the same way. It enabled me to flip the whole “job seeker as unwanted supplicant” to job seeker as valuable solution to employers problems.
• 12 Step Program. Changed the way I viewed God from an abstract something or other that couldn’t care less about me to an always available unconditionally loving presence. Made me someone capable of getting married and being a mom.
• More soon

Things that Inspire Me

I’m working on some ideas around what inspires and energizes me. I figure it would be good to do more of these things!

• Making a referral: connecting someone with someone or something else that might help them move forward
• Writing
• A good conversation with a smart, talented person
• Watching my cats do their cat things
• Learning a practical, relevant, and out of the box way to make my life better
• Great graphic design
• Great, well made products that make my life better and add beauty

11/14 Making a Positive Difference in the World

Stuff I did over the last couple days that made a real, positive difference in the world.

• Told a client who I felt was spinning his wheels trying to do a brochure to let go of the damn brochure already and start developing his social network
• Helped a client further define her target customer definition. She’s gotten two customers and that makes me feel happy for her.
• Wrote copy for a client that was very heartfelt and captured the spirit of her inspirational CDs
• Wrote a little note about how my instructor’s errors made things feel more freeing to me and it made him feel really good.
• Offered a good example yesterday around how to write an article and how to create a story
• Referred someone to the DaVinci group