Step One: Eliminating the Energy Drains - Their's and Your's

You know it is time for your next dream when you start feeling restless where you are.

It’s time to either expand or move beyond your current dream when life becomes a series of rote activities and your passion and purpose appear lost. You have simply outgrown your current state of existence and now the price of growth is, as  always, change and a willingness to jump off the next cliff, no matter how frightening or unsettling.

Wonderfully, discovering your next dream can fill you with a great sense of clarity, freedom, fluidity and joy. You know you're there because your energy reflects it. Sharing that however, in proclaiming your newly realized dream to friends and family, without a doubt, will inevitably mean someone or some ones will “know” even before you begin that the dream is impossible, unrealistic, or filled with flawed thinking. Someone knows someone who tried it and it failed. At best, those folks will just knock the winds out of your sails yet sadly at times they can cause you to rethink, doubt, and abandon what just moments ago felt like a fantastic next step.

Anticipate that those who rarely allow themselves to dream, even with good intent, may want to protect you from dreaming and what they perceive to be the inevitable failure. (Thus the reason they don’t allow themselves to dream.) When those who are fear-filled, or apathetic in life dispense their “wisdom” look back into your life and instead of playing your own tapes of inadequacy, unpreparedness, limitedness, and so forth, literally make a list of every dream you have had so far, every wish you have lived, and realize that once you have achieved a dream, you know what to do for the next. Once you have trusted you and won, the next dream is just a few known steps away.

Dorothy A. Martin-Neville, PhD, is a motivational speaker, author, coach, and psychotherapist who has spent her career helping others, through humor and faith, claim their dreams, eliminate self-sabotage, and become everything they were meant to be.

She can be reached at: drdorothyct.com    dorothy@drdorothyct.com   860-543-5629   

I Want To Be Heard, I Just Don’t Know What to Say

Writing a blog is something a lot of people aspire to do. The benefits of having a blog are plentiful: increased visibility, building your credibility as an expert, establishing your personal brand, expanding your reach into the global marketplace, and let’s not forget the possibility of making money. But the reality is that keeping up with a blog is a lot harder than starting a blog. The Internet is full of outdated and abandoned blogs. As movers, shakers, and entrepreneurs, we all know that blogging is something we should have on our to-do list, but how do you come up with all that content?

Here are 3 quick tips for making sure you will always have something to write about:

1.     Don’t Get Overwhelmed by One-At-a-Time Thinking: Instead of expecting to come up with a great idea two days before your posting deadline, set yourself up for success by scheduling a couple of hours to sit down and come up with a whole bunch of ideas at the same time. One of the advantages of this approach is that you can take your big ideas and keep breaking them down into smaller increments and manageable word counts. In general, a blog post shouldn’t be too long. If it’s over 500 words, you might have enough content for two blogs. If a post is too long, people are a lot less likely to read it. 

2.     Coming Up With Ideas:  If you’re having a hard time coming up with an idea for your blog, go to the internet and read the blog posts and tweets of your contemporaries, or leaders in your field. This isn’t about copying someone else’s content. Instead, read what other people are talking about and decide if you have a different viewpoint, something to add, or can go deeper into the subject. The advantage of riffing on someone else’s content is that you can embed a link into the author’s name or idea. Readers will appreciate your confidence and willingness to share the stage with others. So will the author of the original content.

 

3.     Think Big, but Start Small: What do you think when you go to check out someone’s blog and see that the author hasn’t posted for a very long time? Will you send them an email to ask them if everything is okay? Probably not. If you decide to start blogging, set up a time frame you can comfortably commit to and stick to it. If you’re not sure how to write a blog, don’t expect to write two posts per week. Start with one per month. Give yourself at least two weeks to write it. When you’re comfortable writing one per month, try twice a month. You get the idea.

There are definite advantages to having a blog, but set yourself up for success before you write your first post. The internet is full of great information and ideas for managing a blog. Of course, I’m here to help too. You can email me at Valerie@ValerieUtton.com.