Also here – sometimes being Bold is what goes on behind the scenes.

There is a calm. A grounding.

An ability to see things how they are, not that which my worry imagines they could horribly metamorphosize. Not how they should have been if I had know better, if I was a good mother, if they had treated me right, if I could write all futures.

I’m here.

Yes, there were tactics I used to bring this calm into my life.

Accepting that I am Highly Sensitive and, as such, living in a high-rise in San Francisco a block from Fire Station No. 1 and riding in packed & smelly public transit system all day was not healthy for my body or my soul.

Allowing myself to be healed not only of the injury that was on the surface, but the damage done to me by the tumor my daughter carried in her brain. Healing of the meanness the Ideal Woman in my head pounded me with over the last few years. Healing of wounds I had suffered for so long, I forgot what it was like to be undamaged.

Deciding. Moving. Buying. Signing. Starting new projects, registering new domain names, beginning a certification program in the MBTI and a Master of Arts in Human Behavior.

Writing three pages in my journal each morning, to dump out the crap and the drama and to spread out what’s underneath onto the page, so the truth can reveal.

Playing with a new business plan, a new daily schedule, a new way to arrange my desk. Playing with room for the current iteration of Live Your Truth, room to expand into what Live Your Truth will become, room for entirely new projects that are inviting me forward.

Practicing. Touching. Being. Living the feeling of grounded as I rest here on my sofa entering characters into OMM Writer with my eyes closed, letting the words flow from my insides out onto the screen.

But this transformation didn’t magically happen because of any one of these pills.

Transformation happens in the nexus.

The nexus of these tools and this moment. The nexus of what you do now with all the good and bad and powerful and traumatic that has happened in your life, up until today. The nexus of the pill you practice and the truth that you are.

It is true, that I invite you to find out if your environment supports your temperament.

I invite you to heal injuries that continue to wound you.

I invite you to decide, to move forward, to expand.

I invite you to write.

I invite you to create a schedule with space for where you are going.

I invite you to practice being grounded in this moment.

But I remind you.

What you do this weekend, what you experience in that program, what you write from that journal prompt, what you fix with that healer – the results from those tactics may happen all at once.

Or they may not show up for years.

Just like social media campaigns, constructing a new two car garage, or conceiving a new member of your family, transformational results do not flow immediate from a tactic.

Transformation flows from the strategy.

Do the Work.

Pay Attention.

Love.

Live.

Accept.

Take the Risk.

Have Faith.

Trust.

Trust that the dividends of our investments of work and attention and love and living will reveal themselves in their own time.

When we are ready.

We just have to keep showing up.

—

Are you still waiting for peace to arrive? Are you frustrated because you’re doing all the right things and it hasn’t happened yet?

Have you done work where the results showed up for you years later? Are things finally coming together for you?

I’d love to hear from you below!

This past weekend I spent offline, off social media, off work … in the world of the face to face. The world of the flesh. The world of the now.

And for the first time, in more than a forever, I felt normal.

Everything was easy. In the present. Overflowing with abundant energy.

No analyzing, no drama, no whorlybrain, no stress about what I should do or what’s going to happen in the future or what does this person think.

I felt completely myself.

And there was nothing wrong about me.

This post is not about disengaging from social media, this post is not about extreme self care, this post is not about rebelling against society norms or stop listening to what people tell us to do or ignoring the shoulds.

This is a post about feeling your normal.

A few years ago, something happened when I recognized what my truth was not … that put me in the particularly painful state of feeling my weirdness.

Feeling how I was out of sync with most of everyone around me. How the shoulds of the big law job and the house in the suburbs and the marriage to the right person aren’t just the wrong choice — they were undeniably uncomfortable. Painful. Like a joint that’s been forced out of socket.

For so long, I spent my days going through the motions, until those moments when my soul leaked onto my face and I got that shocking look, when someone realized that I’ve been faking it just to keep things afloat.

Then, about a year ago, I decided to live my truth. Take those first (second, third, five hundredth) uncomfortable steps.

And every day I wore my weirdness on my skin.

Thought about the shoulds and what do they think and all the choices I felt guilty about not making. Every moment required bravery.

Until another profoundity snuck up on me.

The moment when I stopped thinking.

The moment when I chose to pull off the shroud of weirdness, and just be myself.

The unthinking truth that I really am, underneath.

So this post is for you who are still feeling your weirdness.

For those of you who are painfully aware of your shoulds, of how you are out of sync, how you are required to be brave every second or you will fall back into the comfortable grayscale of mediocrity.

Have faith. You are on the steepest part of the climb.

There will come a day (all of a sudden! it will sneak up on you!) when you will forget that you are weird. When you stop comparing yourself to everyone else. To what you should be.

There will come a day when you will be doing something or spending time with someone who resonates directly with that unthinking truth of you.

The day when the weirdness will fall away, and your true being will take over.

And you will feel your peace. Your rightness. Your place in the universe.

In that quiet moment, you will feel your normal.

In that quiet moment, you will be ruined forever.

The shoulds, the mediocre, the vanilla of the artifice in which you used to live will be forever unreachable, intolerable, bizarre to you.

In that delicious moment, you know that you can never go back.

Fuck yeah.

—

Are you living your truth? If you want to get caught up on first year of the Live Your Truth journey, be sure to get your copy of Year One of Living Your Truth ebook (400+ pages!). You’re not still waiting for the damn magical fairies, are you? Start your adventure right now.

—

Do you feel weird? Normal? What do the words “weird” and “normal” mean to you? I’d love to hear from you below!

I was a Junior in college, just having broken up with my high school boyfriend of 3 1/2 years and found myself trapped at a intergenerational latino festival with some of my friends. Watching couples slow dancing. Adorable couples who had been married the longest of anyone at the festival. Married for 25, 30, 50 years.

That moment I finally felt the truth of my breakup. For the first time in years, I was desperately alone. I felt those jagged, abandoned pieces inside my chest that were raw and broken. On the edge of collapsing into tears or throwing up on the dance hall floor.

My friend Tracy took one look at me, pulled me out of the room & drove me back to the dorms. While giving me this demotivational, come to jesus speech as I wept in the passenger seat next to her.

“Elizabeth, you cannot trust anyone.”

“Even when you are in a relationship, the only person you can depend upon is yourself.”

“We are born alone, and we die alone.”

Her words still haunt me. Fourteen years later. Today.

Because this morning I woke up with a case of the melancholies.

It’s nothing. It’s everything.

My daughter being in camp full time, a readjustment of my role in her life and the time I have with her, and my definition of myself as a mother and a woman. The instability of my business, where half of my launches fail or underperform, I’m constantly living on the edge, two launches away from going under. The idiosyncraticness of my love life. The status or lack thereof of my bank account. The uncertainty of where I will be, in any part of my life, in 6 months from today. In 6 days from today.

Most of the time all of those things are amazing and exciting, interesting and challenging, full of deliciousness and ecstasy.

Today, I just feel blank. Unclear. Alone.

And I thought about what Tracy said.

And pictured that gapingvoid cartoon.

That cartoon that haunts me. Haunts me in such a way that as much as it resonates with me, I can’t bring myself to buy it and hang it on my wall.

“The price of being a Wolf is LoneLiness.”

I don’t want to believe that I am either a sheep buying into the bullshit of false security, or a wolf who is forced to walk the earth alone in order to stick to my integrity, to my art, to my calling.

I don’t want to believe that that the only way to live my truth, is to be alone.

I miss being part of a team. I miss having people who work with me, where I can depend on them to help with projects, brainstorm ideas, that feeling of “we” instead of everything just being me. I miss having a partner, where together we’ve chosen each other and created a sanctuary from the insanity of the outside world, where I get to be completely myself. I miss building something together, I miss creating something with someone else.

This is the part of the post where I was going to switch gears.

I was going to launch into a brilliant self-help section on how you can get out of the melancholies, based upon what worked for me today.

But nothing worked for me today.

I went for a 2-hour walk by the bay, drank the triple grande nonfat nowhip mocha, ate the everything bagel with plain cream cheese. I worked out hard and drank lots of water. I ate a big bowl of pasta with tomato cream sauce, indulged in dark chocolate, utilized my vibrator, wrote in my journal, made lists of everything that’s good in my life. I had long text conversations with a best friend, watched a movie, chatted with people on twitter and facebook.

Here’s the thing. I intellectually understand that my life is awesome.

Yes, I am part of a powerful tribe. Yes, I am blessed with amazing best friends. Yes, I am not really alone, when it comes down to it.

I intellectually understand that … but today, I don’t feel that. All I feel are the melancholies. No matter what I do.

So today I’m going to give myself permission to just feel that way. Maybe I need a day off from epicness and awesometasticness. Maybe I have real shit going on that I need to work through. I don’t know what the deal really is about.

Today, I’m taking the day off from fixing myself.

I’ll talk to you tomorrow.

Has everyone been telling you that you need to “pick just one?”

For us multipassionate (to quote Marie Forleo) entrepreneurs, focusing on “just one thing” would be the death of us.  But if we don’t “focus” how can we get anything done?

So in the interest of Being Real and Being Uncomfortable, here’s the truth of what’s going on w/ me right now.  Cause everything is not all rocking-out and super-cool all the time … sometimes, it’s confusing, stressful, crappy, and weird.

Oh, and by the way, you also hereby have permission to not be happy all of the time too.

But the business finally took off after the San Jose Mercury News published a wonderful feature about me in Summer 2004, and the biz had its first profitable months with an almost-full load of clients. Of course, that was just about the time we got pregnant (after we had stopped officially “trying” and had decided to put it off until my business was further along, lol).  

Four years ago today, after just 4 hours of easy labor (used hypnobirthing) and 45 minutes of intense-craziness at the end, Grace was born at 3:44 PM.  When we got home we went through the adventure of nursing with a girl who did not care about eating (and kept losing weight) until she was 4 1/2 weeks old.  She did sleep wonderfully (7 hrs at night at 5 weeks!) but could not stop moving — living in a sling, Baby Bjorn, swing, or Amby Motion Bed.  Her newborn quirks were a big shock to me. 

After those 7 weeks of intense newborn-dom, I came back from maternity leave to my business as a mom entrepreneur.

Phase 1:  Part-Time Nanny & Trading Hours for Dollars

After my daughter was born, I had fleeting thoughts of dropping my business and simply being a stay at home mom for a while (course, nothing simple in that, eh?).  But I did not feel finished with working, and frankly, I needed a break from my high-intensity, clingy daughter.  I needed grown up, intellectual stimulation.  And a situation where no one was trying to get inside my shirt.  

Since I was still seeing clients in person, I needed care for my daughter while I was working.  But day care did not seem like a good option for us, since I wanted to nurse her without pumping, and she was an always-needing-to-be-carried kind of kid.  And, face it, I wanted control over the situation and day care made me nervous.   So instead of getting on the (long) waiting list of a good day care, we opted for a part-time nanny.

We hired our wonderful nanny Sarah using Town & Country Resources nanny service.  She was more expensive than we had imagined, but she was unusually suited to us – she had a college degree, was working on her own floral design business, and had tons of nanny experience.  And, she enjoyed carrying Grace around in a sling for hours each day.  

My business went through a short post-maternity slump, because I had not been marketing or prospecting during my leave (ah, the days before online marketing).  But after a few months, I was back in business.  

Lesson Learned:  We must automate our marketing (via online marketing, eZine’s, auto-responders, etc.) to avoid slumps when life gets crazy. 

Phase 2:  The Nanny Turnstile & I’m Bored.

In Spring of 2006 I seriously thought about shutting down my business.  The business had plateaued.  And since I was bored, I did not want to pound the networking pavement to fill up the rest of my practice.  Heck, I didn’t want to fill up my practice – I resented spending time on clients.  As was not making enough money.

Instead of shutting down my practice, I hired two coaches – Kim Fulcher as my life coach and Kelly O’Neil as my marketing coach.  And gave my business another 6 months to turn around.  Kim helped me bring some balance and intention back to my life, and, for the first time, helped me find the beliefs about money and success that were keeping me in self-sabotage mode.  

Kelly kicked my butt in marketing, got me (scared and wining) to schedule my first teleclass series, and brainstormed with me to come up with the new name for my business, “The Wealth Spa.”  I started my first blog that August, and learned about Ali Brown & this whole information marketing thing.  My business world was getting interesting again.  

Then nanny Sarah went on maternity leave, so we were forced to hunt for new nannies.  We went through 4 nannies in 6 months (including a brief stint from Sarah who realized she wanted to be home with her own baby).  I can’t even tell you how many women we interviewed.  Gave offers that were too late, considered women who were less than optimal.  Then the last nanny worked for us for only 6 weeks until she gave her leave, and I was on search again.

Every time we were nanny-less I had to fight for solutions.  Backup daycare through my husband’s work was okay, but Grace always came home with a cold afterwards.  Working at home with her was okay for email but did not fly for client appointments.  When my parents were in town (from St. Louis, Missouri) they watched her so I could make client calls & teach a teleclass.  Course they could not make the 2000 mile commute more then for a vacation visit.  

Lesson Learned:  Before the breakthrough there is a breakdown – so welcome the breakdown, it means you’re ready to make a leap forward!  

Phase 3:  All Day Preschool & Projects, Teleclasses, Book, oh my!

After attending Ali Brown’s Online Success Blueprint Workshop in November 2006, I relaunched my eZine & website and my online business began to take off.  Raised my fees and standardized project fees (instead of hourly work), taking on a high caliber of clients. Started regular free teleclasses to build the email & mailing list, launched a viral movie w/ Scott Stratton’s Un-Marketing team (adding thousands to my list), and started hosting my radio show (back then on Voice America Business).  

Then in Spring of 2007, Ali Brown asked me to be part of her Platinum Mastermind program.  I freaked out when I got that voicemail – why was she calling me?  What did she see in me that I did not see (yet)? I knew her program was a huge financial and time commitment.  But at that moment I decided to get serious about taking my business to the next level, and I knew I needed that financial commitment and a mastermind team to hold me accountable.  I took the jump in faith.

Meanwhile, when Grace turned two I decided to put her in an all-day preschool (and day care) program.  The theory was if I was going to get serious about my business, I needed more time.  (And my secret theory was when my business took off, I would be able to pull her out of school and homeschool her.)  She cried for the first few days, bonded with the caregivers, made a best friend, and was then excited to go to school.

Lesson Learned:  We don’t see our own brilliance because to us, it’s ordinary.  We need coaches, teaches, mastermind partners to reflect our brilliance back for us to see.  

Phase 4:  Part-Time Preschool & No More Clients

In March of 2008, I started reading my friend Sandy Grason‘s book, Journalution, which is about how to find solutions to your life using journaling.  I had stopped journaling years ago, with some weird idea that my husband might read my journal so it was not safe (as if he would ever read it, how nuts of me).  But per Sandy’s advice, I bought a brand new, unlined, lime-green-covered journal, and sat down to answer the journaling prompt “Describe Your Perfect Day.”

The idea of a perfect day seemed so unreal I was unable to answer the question until I added the caveat, “…three years from today.”  So I described a perfect day in 2011, where I was running an publishing/information marketing/magazine business, teaching a teleclass, and talking to a coaching client on the phone, while homeschooling my daughter (and with my husband working on his own home business in the next room).  As I read my entry, I realized that I was waiting for magical circumstances (that would never happen) for my vision to arise.  Instead … what if I just did that perfect day right now? 

So I pulled Grace out of full time and put her in a 2-days a week, 1/2 day preschool program, and invested in TONS of homeschooling resources.  Stopped seeing financial planning clients (drastically reducing my income but freeing up time and energy).  Finished my first major information product.  Published my first book.  Re-launched my business as The Wealth Spa Online Magazine.  And did that with just 6 hours of regular childcare each week (plus a few days each quarter of temporary nanny time for out-of-town travel and speaking engagements).  It is possible. 

Lesson Learned:  Don’t wait for something to happen to start living life (because that day will never come).  Stop waiting.  Simply live in the moment today.  

Phase 5:  Homeschooling & and Clients again?

Until on December 30, 2008 when Grace said, to no one in particular as she was getting in the car, “This is the last day I’m going to school.”  What?  I completely freaked, I needed those 6 hours a week to make phone calls, teach teleclasses, write articles, get work done!  Now I was not surprised, really…she had stopped enjoying school when she moved to the 3 year old “real preschool” classroom that fall, with its large class size, higher student-teacher ratio, and absence of her best friends from the 2 year old room.  (And, as she told me a few weeks later, one boy had been kicking her on a regular basis, what the heck?!)

But after 5 years in business and almost 4 as a mom, my freak-out-ness was not long lasting.  Tons of resources popped up into my awareness, from Cubes & Crayons on-demand childcare/work sharing, to the zillion classes for kids in my area, to homeschooling co-ops.  After just 2 weeks, we were back in a routine, and, frankly, I was more productive than ever before.  

Now it’s Spring again, and again I’m moving to another business & personal growth phase.   The online business is growing exponentially, and I’m doing tons of speaking engagements. (Ironically to my no-more-clients decision in 2008), I’m secretly planning to open 4 one-on-one coaching spots and a 15-person group coaching program for other mom business owners.  (Okay, it’s not secret if I’m blogging about it, lol.)  After casually, speaking about my personal mompreneur strategies for the last few years, I want to bring these solutions to all of those moms who are trying to grow a business and raise kids, all without losing their minds or struggling through daily life.  

Lesson Learned:  After the last 4 years as a mompreneur, who knows what next challenge/opporunity will jump into my life tomorrow.  But as always, it’s an adventure (and that’s the point, eh?).  

–

Join me for the free teleclass, “The 5 Shifts Moms Must Make to Succeed as Entrepreneurs,” where you will learn:

• Why mom entrepreneurs are different, and how being a mom makes us better business owners
• What you must do differently to feel fulfilled in your conflicting roles
• How to create the support you need asap
• The big myths of successful “mompreneurs” and work-at-home moms, and why you can’t buy into them
• The #1 mistake moms are making that’s holding them back making the really big bucks, or even just a profit

Date:  Wednesday April 1, 2009

Time:  Noon Pacific (3 PM EST)

(this free call will be recorded)

Join us at http://MompreneurCall.com