We got back from the desert Wednesday and I spent the next four days thinking about Spongebob. My kids love the show so I’ve seen a few episodes. From time to time the little guy starts shriveling up because he’s out of the water. That’s how my brain felt. I think it was the slowest to dry out and the last to rehydrate.

My slowly drying brain may be part of the reason I felt so out of it when I thought about my business during the trip. Another reason was the setting. We were in Scottsdale most of the time, staying in a resort hotel. It’s hard to relate to authenticity and people striving to improve themselves mentally, interpersonally, and spiritually in that setting. I realized my drive for authenticity and self-expression was nearly drowned out by the power of the communal rut – of affluence.

Driving past the Mercedes dealership, then the Jaguar dealership, then the BMW dealership and the Range Rover dealership, it’s easy to develop the mistaken belief that fine living is a motivation for people to become solo entrepreneurs. In reality, many of the people enjoying that affluent lifestyle have high-paying jobs and spend a lot of time worrying about keeping them so they can protect their income.

On another level, affluent living not only pushes people to live in ruts to pursue and keep high-paying jobs, it also dictates the rut for enjoying the affluence. The stores, the restaurants, and the resorts all tell us This is how affluent people enjoy their money. Fit in by liking golf, spas, high-end shopping, expensive restaurants, and deserts artificially turned into tropical oases. It’s what all the “cool kids” are doing! Then fit in by getting into the high-paying job rut, and fight like crazy to stay there because it’s tough competition.

This rut thing gets even worse. Over Sunday dinner with my wife’s family we were talking about a news report that Joanna Rowling, Harry Potter creator and billionaires, gave a commencement address at Harvard and there were protests. It seems the ivory tower snobs consider her a second-rate talent and would have preferred someone more literary.

Joanna Rowling is one of my heroes. She had a story to tell and she committed herself to writing it and getting it published. It is, by most accounts, the best-selling book series of all time. At a time when people were giving up on getting kids to read, thinking we had to “dumb down” books and shorten them, kids started reading novels again. As new books came out, longer than before, the kids kept up. Some learned the joy of marathon reading, staying up for hours reading through hundreds of pages.

What a failure! That poor woman will never make it.

I doubt Jo Rowling set out to be a huge financial success with her writing. She probably dreamed of making a million dollars, but could she have conceived of making a billion? She followed her calling and expressed her gifts and talents. She did what she was born to do, and people appreciated it so she was rewarded.

Some trailblazers are making a living, just getting by, but having a great time being rewarded in many other ways. Some have surprising episodes where they make a lot of money and then see the lean times. Some slowly learn more about generating money and increase their pay over time. And some have spectacular financial success and enjoy it so much they do it over and over.

The key difference is the purpose. If they are chasing ways to make money, they are in a rut and they will stay in a rut. They will make money in a rut, they will spend it in a rut, they will be flashy in the rut, they will go into debt in the rut, and they will be afraid of leaving the rut to find themselves.

The trailblazers are discovering and expressing themselves. When they succeed, it’s out of the rut. They spend or save their money as they wish, and they don’t fear losing status and a rut lifestyle so they don’t have to hold back and give up their dreams. They’re free to pursue their dreams and create their own success, by whatever standard they want to measure it.

They know that a rut with beautifully accented handrails is still a rut, and they just won’t settle for that.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Updated 06/10/08 with the Rowling address video links:

Can you feel it? It hangs in the air, like the stuffiness of a closed-up room on a hot, humid day. It’s the pressure to compel graduating high school seniors into a college degree plan, and to compel college graduates into their nicely defined job-boxes.

Having “crossed over,” not only being self-employed but committed to work that helps other people have creative careers and be self-employed, I’m aware of this force all around me. Parents and family and friends of family emanate anxiety when they hear a graduate is still undecided, not sure of the next step. A high school graduate may not go to college right away in the fall. There are quiet gasps and scandalous looks. A college graduate may spend time pursuing more interests to find the right path before choosing a career. What will this do to the balance of nature? Will the earth’s magnetic poles shift, or will our planet wobble in its orbit around the sun?

That collective force acts as if personal freedom and creative choice will bring ominous results. But today’s articles in USA Today sound much more ominous.

“Slow times mean pay cuts for many” tells us bonuses, commission, and tips are falling. “Fuel prices drive some to try four-day workweeks” tells us that some businesses and government agencies are taking the drastic step of cutting back to four-day weeks. Scandal! How do we dare change a work pattern that is several decades old?

Traveling on the Twisting Road takes me above those ruts, so far above that sometimes I forget they are there. From the Road, it looks like you can work on a project at a reasonable pace and finish it, choosing a schedule based on when you are most productive. Up here I see that sometimes work requires a lot of focused hours, and sometimes it’s fewer, less intense hours of follow-up and coordination.

On the Road I bring my laptop when I’m out of town to be able to write the articles for my newsletter and publish them. I don’t spend time working on ongoing writing projects while I’m away, but I still spend a little time to keep up with my publishing schedule. I was even able to attend my advanced coaching class by teleconference today.

With so many of us changing our career focus to do something creative and meaningful in the middle of our lives, isn’t it inevitable that young adults will be more inclined to spend time finding authentic work before they settle into a job-box? It seems likely, and it seems right. At the point of greatest freedom and fewest obligations to hold them back, they can take a little time to find their gifts, talents, and passions and design work that expresses them and honors their values.

We’re in Phoenix for my niece’s high school graduation. I gave her the collection of books I recommended in a recent article in Chasing Wisdom. We also included a gift card, which she found right away, but as she looked through the gift bag she excitedly withdrew Barbara Winter’s Making A Living Without A Job. She was very excited and exclaimed, “Look, Dad! He knew!” They then joked about how she doesn’t want to have to work, but I’m still hopeful that it’s a wish not to be trapped in a boring job-box more than a wish to be able to amble through life with plenty of money and no deeper purpose or focus.

Up here On The Twisting Road we occasionally see people stuck in ruts and reach down to help them up. But many have lived in the ruts so long they can’t imagine there is safety, or provision, or even oxygen outside the rut. If we spread the message to young adults, before they get too settled in their ruts, maybe they’ll hop on the Road and choose blazing trails over wearing ruts into the same old paths.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

An authentic life includes authentic work. Authentic work helps you realize your dreams. It comes out of your gifts and talents and excites your passions.

That was an idea so radical but so obviously true that it grabbed me in a bear hug when I first read it expressed in one of Barbara Sher’s books. I’m hearing it expressed more often now, showing me the power behind the truth of the statement. The first step in finding authentic work is to reconnect with your gifts, talents, and passions, and dreams.

Which is why I can now proudly talk about my “guilty pleasure,” a popular reality show that helped point me to what resonates with my soul.

Don’t stop reading when I tell you it’s American Idol. My discovery of how parts of the show spoke to my core self is proof that you can get to your deepest interests by following wherever your interests lead you.

It wasn’t until the start of this year’s show, season seven, that I took the time to think about what the show taught me about myself. I first got drawn into the show when it started its second season. I was on a business trip in Florida and saw lots of signs about the show, focusing on Simon Cowell being a “monster.” Then I saw the television ads of his harsh comments, plus out-takes of auditions. The humor drew me in.

The format of each season’s earlier episodes is to show the audition process. The producers choose from a variety of comical, strange, interesting, and empathetic people and create short features to introduce them. That’s a joy for me because I love documentaries. The focused features on individual contestants are developed by editing real, unstaged or barely staged footage into a story with a particular viewpoint and emotional tone. That is the heart of documentary filmmaking.

The early episodes include excerpts of auditions of some of the more talented contestants interspersed with the outrageous ones. So while the humor and documentary storytelling draw me in, I start to notice potential waiting to be realized. That’s the big one for me. My passion is advocating personal growth and development, participating in the journey from discovering potential in its unpolished form to seeing it expressed in amazing accomplishments. When people face their fears and stretch their wings to find out what they are capable of doing, I celebrate. So by the time the outrageous auditions are over, I am invested in watching which people will commit to the work of challenging themselves to grow beyond their previous self-imposed limits.

That’s when the documentary quality of the show shifts. From that point on, the individual tales are about people struggling to rise out of poverty, adversity, and lives planned for them by boxes-and-ruts thinking.

It’s also the point where a distinction arises between people who have decent talent but are pursuing fame and wealth above anything else, and those with talent who find joy in developing and expressing it. The former have arrogant attitudes and shun the hard work, blaming others when they fall. The latter find a way to do the best with the challenges they are given. In a few amazing instances some transcend a challenge by finding a very personally expressive and unique way to present a song from their artistic perspective.

The show is cheesy – it’s contrived, inauthentic, and corny at times. The contestants have to perform songs from before they were born in small groups for auditions. They have to perform medleys of songs in musical review style as a group during each results show. Then they are criticized when their individual performances on competition night sound like a show on a cruise ship or at a theme park – a musical review. They are limited to a certain collection of songs by one artist or in one genre, and then they are criticized when they sound like the original. But they are also criticized if the performance is too unique, straying from the way the song was written.

But in the midst of all that unnecessary and inherently conflicted chatter, and the variety show quality of a lot of the “filler” segments, there are beautiful jewels. This year Brooke White sat at the piano and sang Let It Be, and then cried with obvious joy as Paula Abdul – yes, jokes aside, she is capable of amazing insight – put into words what Brooke was experiencing. She was doing what she was born to do, and what she had been planning and striving towards for years, by performing in front of a large live audience and millions watching by television. Paula said, “This is your dream. You’re living it right now.” Brooke melted.

Runner-up David Archuleta provided a few gems along the way, too. His performances of Imagine and Angels were amazing from a seventeen-year-old. His performance under the highest pressure, the night of the final competition, was pretty close to flawless. When he sang Don’t Let The Sun Go Down On Me I thought he had just given the performance that would make him the winner.

But winner David Cook was the best gem of the entire season. Early on in live competition, he took risks with his song choices, and he used different arrangements of songs in a way that let him express his own artistic style very clearly. Throughout the voting portion of the show, he was increasingly a strong artist, a compelling performer, and a singer who knew his voice well enough to rely on his strengths to express a song and connect with the audience. During the final night of competition he was a little rough and his voice a little raw, but he had already shown the courage of expressing himself as an artist, so people were eager to vote for him.

David Cook was a bartender working in Tulsa, Oklahoma when his brother asked him to accompany him to the auditions in Omaha. He did it to support his brother. During the initial screening round, the producers talked to him about auditioning. He said he hadn’t come to audition, but they talked him into it.

Every time he received critique from the judges, he made eye contact, he listened closely, and he responded with humility. When he was praised, he expressed gratitude. When he was criticized, he never argued or challenged. He displayed maturity and strong character. And each week he got better.

Now he’s going to be doing what he loves and sharing it with millions of people. What’s not to love about that?

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

This week my main work was to make some decisions. Just writing that it doesn’t sound like much. But these were decisions that I had been considering for quite a while, so they were the culmination of a lot of mental work.

First, I decided I will use the current format of sections for my Chasing Wisdom Blog-Zine through June. Starting in July I will change the format to be more focused on creativity, personal growth, and authentic living. In my framework of Why? What? How? it’s going to be focused on Why?

Why? is about purpose, the reasons we want to change and try a different path. What? is the change we decide to make or the new path we decide to follow. How? is the way we make it happen, the detailed steps we follow and pieces of information we gather to make our What become real so we can honor our Why.

On The Twisting Road, my e-mail newsletter (e-zine), will be focused more on What? and How? The articles and tips will be more practical and more action-oriented than Chasing Wisdom.

I have been posting articles to my Anything But Marketing! blog on a weekly basis. I realized I don’t intend to do that long-term. I usually post ideas based on conversations with fellow coaches and service professionals. I will post weekly when I can, but eventually I will compile the articles into a larger information product and pull down the blog. It’s a useful way for me to gather a variety of ideas for the future. I will include the ABM! posts in the newsletter whenever I have a new one.

On The Twisting Road will be published weekly on a regular basis, with occasional extra issues for special events or product announcements as I develop them. I have gone back and forth, and forth and back, trying to balance my preference for a focused newsletter with my preference for not publishing it so often it becomes annoying. I am on newsletter lists where I receive multiple issues in a week. Too often I find myself getting annoyed by multiple newsletter issues per week. I am most pleased with newsletters that arrive on a weekly or semi-weekly basis. As a result of my completely unscientific research of a non-representative sample – me – I chose to have a weekly publishing format.

I will publish Chasing Wisdom monthly. I have been posting a section per week, for a total of four sections per month. That was a way to have weekly content for my newsletter: There’s a new section of my Blog-Zine posted! Since the newsletter has its own content and will be targeted a little differently, I can write Chasing Wisdom over the course of the month and publish it in a day or two.

Another decision I made was the format for my new business cards. I’ve been planning the new ones since I started passing out the current ones. I have streamlined my card to web address, e-mail address, and phone number. It’s applicable to my business as a writer, trainer, information publisher, and coach… because it doesn’t mention any specific job! I’m looking forward to learning what it’s like to pass them out, and to finding out how they will be received.

I clarified my decision not to focus on parent coaching. I realized I am passionate about healthy child development, especially psychological development, but not passionate about parents’ struggles. I think I will focus on training teachers and caregivers and coaching people who supervise them instead of coaching parents. I may offer parent training, if I find a market that will pay, but I will limit my coaching around promoting healthy child development to people who are also passionate about it and wanting to learn and grow in their abilities and understanding.

Whenever I take my sons to the bookstore, I’ve been reading Eckart Tolle’s A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose (Oprah’s Book Club, Selection 61). It’s somewhat scholarly so I’m taking my time with it. I try to follow along as he writes about “awareness” that brings people out of “unconsciousness” and helps to overcome the “ego.” To understand him I have to use a different system – Carl Jung’s personality theory, which is also complex and esoteric.

Tolle’s book gives me hope in this way: if he can have a successful career writing such cumbersome books about profound philosophical and spiritual ideas, and even train groups and provide individual counseling on them, I can probably have a successful coaching and training business that includes excursions into deeper purposes along with practical steps to improvement.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Somewhere in the past few days, I decided to write a new tag line for my business. The current version is:

Your Path To An Authentic Life Starts Here

The key idea that resonates with me is authentic living. Personal growth and development is about living authentically. It’s about uncovering your gifts, talents, and passions, and designing a life that incorporates and expresses them while honoring your values.

I realized this week, after writing an article for my Anything But Marketing! blog, that I keep coming back to “Why?” as the starting point for many things.

Why? To What End? What Is The Purpose?

These questions are central to me when designing my business, planning marketing, choosing a niche for coaching, and pretty much in most areas of my life. I haven’t read a complete Stephen Covey book yet – just chapters and excerpts – but I hear many people quote him when they say, “Begin with the end in mind.” It’s this focus on purpose, and the willingness to explore and question and clarify purpose, that compels me.

The purposes that interest me most are deeper. They are transcendent, they are creative, and they are spiritual. I think living authentically means honoring these deeper purposes. I think it means pursuing a connection with things that are eternal.

I am encouraged that Barbara Winter discusses the connection between spiritual purpose and small business success in her recorded discussion with Nick Williams called “Outsmarting Resistance.” Having focused her career on helping people find ways to be self-employed and start small businesses, she has been in a position to see many people pursue this path. She tells us the notion that you must either choose something meaningful and spiritually significant to do, or something profitable, is untrue. She and Nick have seen people become energized when they focus their businesses on things that are meaningful to them, and that energy has contributed to financial success.

Man, I hope that works out! If I have to choose between authentic work and making a lot of money, I don’t even think I can choose. I’m not sure I can sustain something for any period of time if it isn’t meaningful.

I really want this to be possible. I really want to find out that living authentically is the ultimate measure of success, and that it leads to financial success.

I’m sure that it’s true for many people. I’m nearly sure it’s true for everyone. I’m going to commit myself to making it true for me.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

This morning I came across this quote in the Early To Rise e-mail newsletter:

“Envy comes from people’s ignorance of, or lack of belief in, their own gifts”
~ Jean Vanier

Scroll down to “The Most Stupid of Vices” by Alexander Green and read his take on envy.

I have printed the quote and taped it to the side of my printer right next to my computer. I am not drawn to it so much for its focus on the folly of envy, but the emphasis on each person’s ability to have the life we think is restricted to only a select few, when we rely on ourselves.

The road to creative solo entrepreneurship is about finding our unique gifts, talents, passions, and values and designing work that aligns with them. But more than that it is about finding the strength and ability to do things we never thought we could, or would have to.

Earlier this week my younger son was saying he wished that we would find a pirate ship filled with sunken treasure, or win a jackpot, so we could be rich. I asked what he would do with the money. He said he would build a huge house with a video game room and a movie room. I tried to point out the extra work and extra expense of a huge house, but he wasn’t really paying attention. The best I could come up with was to give him a blessing.

I told him that, rather than have a lot of money to buy things that would bore him quickly, my wish and hope for him is that he learn how to find work that he loves and start his own business so he can take charge of his future. That way he will have the power in himself to generate money when he wants something. He won’t have to sit around waiting for an unlikely act of fate. Instead, it will be up to him, and that will be much more enjoyable and rewarding.

He got a little down, saying he had no idea what kind of business a nine-year-old could start. As we talked about it he thought maybe he could design things out of LEGOs and sell them. The idea was laid aside and he hasn’t brought it back up, but I’m glad he’s beginning to think about this at nine.

The conversation with my son happened earlier this week. The quote from Vanier showed up in my world today. They point to the same place. When we don’t see our own gifts and our own power, we resent and envy others and blame them for holding us back. When we look at what we want and think, How am I going to do that? we feel abundant, capable, and generous.

There is a next level to this thought, but it’s a little more vague. Some people who want to change their lives, especially related to work, say they want to be self-employed but seem to be waiting for someone else to design them a j-o-b and hand it to them. I think part of that comes from the mentality of not seeing our own gifts and our own power. Some, however, won’t take the steps for other reasons.

I think a lot of people see the effort and work involved in starting even a part-time small business and get overwhelmed. They see it as a drain on resources. The best analogies I can come up with are driving a gas-guzzling car with high gas prices, or camping for a few days away from civilization. You wind up thinking and planning from the point of limitation and scarcity. You think, If I do that, will I have the gas to go do this? or maybe, If I use up all my water on this hike, I’ll just barely have enough to get by until the day I leave.

If you do something that is aligned with your gifts, talents, and passions, energy will flow into you. It will be emotional and spiritual energy. Sure, you’ll still get physically tired if there are physical things to do, but you won’t wind up drained. If you spend a lot of time and effort on something that doesn’t connect with your soul, your emotional and spiritual energy can get tapped out pretty quickly.

I think this is the point of view that keeps a lot of people from trying something out. They think it has to be the exact right thing before they put in the time and energy because they’ve only got this one shot. They don’t realize that working towards an authentic life will restore them and recharge them.

I also think, based on this powerful quote, that they don’t realize how much they can actually do. They don’t see that, if something is important in a way that touches their core, they will find the way to make it happen. They don’t realize they have enormous reserves when it comes to resources for deciding, acting, and making things happen.

Obviously, part of “they” is “me.” I feel a lot of resistance with some ideas, thinking I might wind up putting in too much time and effort only to see it flop, or only to find out I don’t really want to be doing that kind of work long-term. I come from the mindset that I have to get it right, or pretty close to right, because I will run out of gas if I go too long without quick results. I forget that trying out new things is pretty fun a lot of the time, and I forget that I won’t really know if some things are a good choice for me until I try them. To quote my nine-year-old son (in his optimistic version of the saying), “You can’t like it ‘til you try it.”

I’m still learning I don’t have to be sure I’ll be hugely successful at something in order to try it out. I’m re-learning that I’m going to struggle with things and be pretty crummy at a few while I’m learning them. But that’s the joy of mastery. If it’s easy at first, there’s no elation when you conquer it. If it’s a quick and open road, there’s no challenge.

I’ll leave the idea of the quick and open road to the “Make 6 Figures In 7 Days!” crowd. I prefer the reality of the struggle, because it’s the way of the journey, and the journey is the only reason to go anywhere.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Does that idea of “working from anywhere in the world” grab your attention? It always gets mine. With the right kind of work, all you need is a laptop computer and a hot spot plus a cell phone. Maybe you only need access to a computer once in a while. Sounds great, doesn’t it?

I think that somebody needs to offer remedial classes on “How To Work From Anywhere In The World!” I’m not very good at it yet.

My sons and I are traveling to Cincinnati for a soccer tournament. The work I need to do while I’m gone is writing and posting articles and having one coaching session. Already I’m over my head!

When I planned to have my coaching call by cell phone, I forgot about the time change. I’ll be driving to a soccer field at the normally scheduled time, so I had to reschedule the session. My wonderful client was understanding so we changed the session to a different day. But come on! How hard should it be to plan one coaching session?

I have a laptop that’s eight or nine years old and I want to bring it along. But I realized that many of my login sites and passwords are automatically stored in my desktop computer so I might not be able to send out my newsletter or work on my blog-zine.

So I’m writing this during a break in packing early Thursday afternoon. We fly out this evening. I know! What was I thinking?

For all of you struggling with time management problems, take heart. We usually manage the day-to-day stuff because we get into habits and a rhythm. It’s the occasional big event with hard-to-predict time requirements that throws us.

It’s okay, though, because I’m learning. I’m learning that “work from anywhere in the world” is a great marketing argument but a big challenge to pull off. I’m learning that, while it’s fun and exciting to take care of all the little details when your business is small and starting to grow, it can leave you jammed when other things come up. I’m guessing the “work from anywhere in the world” crowd have some excellent employees or virtual assistants keeping things running smoothly behind the scenes while they’re hopping the globe.

Some day I’ll be very good at this. I’ll have everything I need on a new, fast laptop. I’ll have figured out what I need by going places, doing some work while I’m there, and learning each time. If I need to publish something while I’m gone, I’ll know when, where, and how I can do it. If there are things that need to get done that I can’t manage while out of town, I’ll have a virtual assistant to handle them for me.

But this weekend I’m hopping on a plane with my old laptop so I can test run this idea. If I get to work on upcoming articles, I’ll come back to a comfortable schedule. If not, boy am I gonna’ be rushed!

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

Look out world! I am armed with pass codes and HTML!

For those of you whose eyes glaze over when talk turns to the internet, I offer a disclaimer. My big accomplishments this week are all web-related. But be heartened! One scenic turnout in the road led me to a good idea for technophobes.

First, biggest, happiest, and best accomplishment – I learned how to edit my SteveCoxsey.com web site! My web guy is actually a programming and database expert, so websites are a small profit center to him. I like to make little changes here and there, much faster than we could work out. He got brave, and I got brave, and he decided to show me some basics with Front Page last night. I can edit and reformat and change themes and colors and completely screw things up now!

My other accomplishments might seem small by comparison. It was such a little idea I just let it float around in the back of my head for a while before deciding to act. I got three new URLs. I redirected two of them to my blogs. My “Anything But Marketing!” blog on TypePad can now be accessed at AnythingButMarketing.com. This “Twisting Road Travel Log” on Blogger can be accessed at TwistingRoad.com.

Why does this matter? In part because it’s neater and a little cleaner. When I reference a blog the name is the URL. This looks nicer in my e-zine, which I send out in simple text format. That’s the use for my third new URL. I set up a basic free page at OnTheTwistingRoad.com for my e-zine. Eventually I’ll build a “squeeze page” that gives a better enticement for people to sign up. For now there’s something functional at that address.

What’s the point? I can focus on creating a free offer and design the squeeze page to give a free report or free audio or whatever I come up with to people who sign up. It’s another step to building my list, with many more to follow.

Other technical accomplishments weren’t as important. Unless you consider the lighting store adventure I wrote about in Wednesday’s edition of “Anything But Marketing!” Finding those halogen replacement bulbs was a huge accomplishment when you consider the effort it took!

I tweaked my DiscoveryLookout.com site so it is more consistent and flows better. Playing with the little bit of HTML code I’ve learned is fun and takes over my time.

Which brings me to the idea for technophobes. Coaching colleagues will talk about needing to set up a web site but having little knowledge, or they’ll talk about the price of hosting and having a web master design a site for them. Many don’t have a point of comparison and it seems like a lot of money to invest for a basic informational site. A few weeks back I talked about this to a friend who helps a couple of businesses maintain and update their sites. She got back in town this week and was able to give me some ideas yesterday.

She doesn’t have the expertise to design a web site from scratch, but she works very well with templates. She doesn’t know extensive HTML coding, but she knows enough to customize parts of templates and add things the business owners need. The technophobe-friendly idea is to purchase a templated site for a reasonable fee or buy template software. With the free help of a friend who knows a little HTML coding, or the affordable help of someone who is not a web master but can do web maintenance and updating, a technophobe can set up a site fairly quickly for just a little money.

The best part is that this approach lets you learn little steps and be comfortable gaining skills and mastery. The second best part is that it lets you have quick access to and control of your site, which you’re going to want. Trust me!

Technophobes of the world, take heart and move forward into the ominous world of web technology. Technophiles of the world, step up and guide us into the future! And teach us while you do it. And only give us as much as we need each time, and only charge us for the little bit we need!

You may now de-glaze your eyes.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

I’ve gotten in the habit of writing what I’ve learned each week along my own journey as a solo entrepreneur. Sometimes I get a “big picture” view of things that helps me move forward. Sometimes I learn one small thing and another little piece falls into place. Sometimes I re-learn something I already figured out but then forgot. Okay, maybe it’s more than sometimes.

As I sit here thinking about what I learned this week, I can’t come up with anything about being a solo entrepreneur or about my business in particular. But I can come up with important things I haven’t learned!

On Wednesday night I had the great pleasure of facilitating a resource group conference call for students in training through MentorCoach. We struggled with many questions about the line between coaching and consulting or training. In its pure form, coaching helps a client find answers and does not present the coach as an expert on any subject. Providing information or suggestions crosses into consultation or training.

I know I enjoy brainstorming and am able to share specific information when I work with clients, and I don’t want to limit my way of helping to a small box. I want to use coaching skills but not be primarily a coach. What I didn’t learn is what to call that role and the kind of service I want to provide.

I want to find information on personal growth, especially around the idea of living authentically in a way that honors a person’s gifts and passions and values. I want to find exercises and techniques for helping people reconnect to creativity and go through self-discovery. What I didn’t learn is what format to use for sharing information in a way that works best with my own gifts, passions, and values.

I want to encourage creative career choices and help people find the way to work in unique ways that they love. I want to encourage people who can’t find a way to make a living doing what they love to make sure they find work that allows them to do what they love and keeps it at the center of their lives. What I didn’t learn is how to bring something fresh and new to the field, or how to present myself in order to do that.

I want to write on different topics. Most are related to personal discovery and personal growth and stretching oneself to take on new challenges. But I want to write on other topics, too. I want to travel sometimes to see a place and meet interesting people and tell their story. What I didn’t learn is how to do that in a way that leads to income.

That’s the biggest thing I didn’t learn this week. I didn’t learn all the steps to fill in between a free e-mail newsletter and a free blog-zine on one end and paid services on the other. That’s due in large part to the fact that I didn’t learn what it is I really want to be doing to earn money! I want to write, and I want to work directly with people, individually and in groups. But I didn’t learn what that’s going to look like.

So I end this week with lots of questions and not many answers. Which, oddly enough, is the beginning of an answer. I like the fact that coaching moves people forward and helps them accomplish goals. But I also want to work with people who have no easy answers, and need to marinate in their questions for a while, because the discovery is slow and may run very deep.

I wonder what that’s going to look like!

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey

A few years back we lived in a different city, another nearby suburb in the area between Dallas and Fort Worth. When we moved into our little (actually tiny) house, we were surrounded by open fields. Our house and the neighbors’ house were the only ones there – former model homes in a development that was stalled for years because of a court case over ownership of the land.

Over time, the Farm to Market road that passed by old farmhouses and lots of open land was widened to two lanes plus a turn lane. Traffic lights went in, and so did convenience stores, strip malls, and housing additions. The other Farm to Market road that intersected it a few miles north, the one that took me to the lake by passing through a couple of old country towns, eventually got widened, too. Now it’s the main street of an upscale suburb with Starbucks, a gourmet grocery store, and a huge shopping, dining, and entertainment center. The drive from the old house to the lake used to take less then twenty minutes. That same drive would be almost twice as long now, with all the traffic and those darned traffic lights.

Since we didn’t move far, I still drive in the area close to the old house, sometimes several times per week. A friend was talking to me the other day about a new strip mall in that area and said it was just down from the new funeral home. I was totally confused and couldn’t figure out where she was describing because there were no funeral homes in the area. She told me the intersection again, so the next time I went that way I looked closely. There was a new funeral home, next to the new architect’s office, down from the new church.

This reminded me of a day when we had lived in our old house for a few years when an elderly lady at the corner gas station was completely lost. She was explaining she was looking for the old main street that had the feed store on it. The feed store had moved into a big new building on the Farm to Market road and the old building was being renovated. With all the new construction in the area she couldn’t find her familiar landmarks. She didn’t get out to drive very often, but it was a month or less since she last drove and things had changed that quickly. I let her follow me up the road about a quarter of a mile, and then I turned to drive her by the old feed store. From there she said she would be fine.

Things change around us constantly, even if we want to live in a rut. Sometimes people choose ruts because they’re predictable and comfortable. But the rut you start following today will not be the rut you follow in ten years, even if you try. The business I co-owned was very different the day we sold it compared to the day I joined it. The year I spent returning to a therapy practice after selling the business was a distant experience to the seven years I spent as a therapist before the business.

Last summer while on a road trip I took a slight detour to show my sons the house my family lived in for many years of my childhood. The rural area outside the small town now has a car dealership on one corner and small shops and offices on the road to it. There were so many new houses I drove by my old house and had to turn around to find it. Once again, I felt like that elderly lady, in a familiar place but with so much new information the familiar was hidden.

This week I’ve been thinking a lot about what it means to me to pursue a creative career and be a solo entrepreneur. It doesn’t mean safety or predictability. It doesn’t mean the comfort of the known. It means adventure, and challenges, and the freedom to fall. It means I step into new territory every day, even if it’s just figuring out how to position something on my web page by learning one piece of HTML code. It means I can look at people who are successful at similar things and learn from them, but I don’t just follow their path. I figure out where those skills and accomplishments will be important on the trail I’m blazing for myself.

Life’s going to change around me whether I want it to or not. If I don’t keep up it’s going to leave me behind. I’d rather be out there exploring and learning and trying new things. This way I’ll be more comfortable with changes and can take them in stride. And I’ll be in charge of more of the changes, making them happen to improve my life.

May You Know the Joy of Sharing Your Gifts,

Steve Coxsey