Weekly Review #7 (the Saturday edition): Migraines, Idea Overwhelm and Help from Many Places

So how am I doing in my quest to re-invent my life, follow my evolving Blisses and create the life I really, really want?

Obviously I’m a bit behind, since I usually do my weekly review on Fridays, and it’s now Saturday. But perhaps this will become tradition, like the Christians switching the Sabbath from Saturday to Sunday; jury’s still out.

First theme of the week: migraines.

As a migraneur, I’m always looking for patterns to my migraines, especially when, like this week, they strike almost every day for several days in a row.

Seriously no fun, even if, like me, your migraines tend to be on the milder side.

Perhaps my brain is exploding from having too many ideas and not knowing which ones to move forward with..?

Actually, it’s much more likely my migraines are linked to another theme of the week:

Staying up waaaaaaay too late

And insomnia on the rare occasions I got to bed early.

So that’s what was hard. Now let’s look at:

What went well

1) Noticing that I already have a really good life

Last week I listened to an interview with fellow ketubah artist Tsili Pines, the lesson from Day 29 of the Empire Building Kit. Tsili spent 8 years slowly building up her ketubah business while working full time as a graphic designer, and recently quit her job to focus full time on her own business.

For her, running her own ketubah business is living the life she really, really wants.

14+ years into my own successful ketubah business, I’m now looking for more. I want to create stuff that I feel like creating (visual art, yes, but also music, video tutorials, ebooks… the list goes on), rather than just creating what clients ask me to create, and I want to find the Right People who resonate with what I do. I want to spend more of my time creating new things, and not necessarily things for weddings.

What was great about the video interview, though, was that it reminded me of what a cool day job I already have. It helped me appreciate the wonderful things about being a ketubah artist, so that I can get back to fully enjoying it while I simultaneously create new things and new income streams to create a more fully balanced life that fits me better.

2) Learning some new things, reinforcing other new things

Monday marked the start of the $100 Business Forum, a 28-day online class and forum for folks like me who want to build, or grow, a Very Small Business. Although it took a few days for me to get the hang of it (a clunky ning.com interface doesn’t help; watch for a more in-depth review later), I’m starting to see what it’s all about, and excited about the connections that are beginning to form.

Plus the really cool thing is that the daily lessons are reinforcing principles and ideas I’ve been getting elsewhere. For someone like me (ie, with a brain that is not inherently wired for business and marketing), this repetition is exactly what I need.

Which brings me to one of my other teacher-heroes.

During an insomiac blitz the other night, I finished Naomi Dunford’s Marketing School, which I got as part of an upsell package (along with Art + Money and Working for Yourself) when I bought the Empire Building Kit.

Again, this book deserves a serious, in-depth review, which I promise to share with you later. For now, suffice it to say that insomnia sucks, but if it means reading Marketing School, well, at least it’s super-productive insomnia. With ninjas.

3) A coaching consultation/a direction/a client or two

On Wednesday I had an introductory consult with my yoga teacher, Susan, who has recently also become a life coach. It was brief, and no huge epiphanies emerged, but I might get a client out of it.

How?

I love to share what I know, and though I’m not a techie, one of the things I’m really good at is teaching what technical stuff I do know how to do in a way that doesn’t make people’s eyes glaze over and their heads spin. I absolutely love empowering people to do what they didn’t think they’d ever be able to do!

When I mentioned to Susan that one of the things I’m interested in doing is helping technophobes create a simple WordPress website or blog, so they can maintain and edit their website all by themselves, Susan said she was interested!

And in the meantime, someone else has expressed interest as well (indication from the Universe that this is a good direction, perhaps?)

The magic part: I came right home from my meeting with Susan and set up a demo site! (Amazing how the prospect of an actual client gets me off my butt and working on something.)

In case you’re wondering, no, building WordPress websites and creating tutorials on same is not creating my art, but it could be a new income stream that would also satisfy my desire to help people and share what I know, which is nothing to sneeze at. And creating tutorials will be fun!

Watch this space…

Takeaways

Sigh. Perhaps my biggest takeaway this week is that I really need to work on my getting-to-bed-at-a-reasonable-hour problem.

Yeah, I know.

Seems I’m not quite ready to tackle that one yet, since here it is 10:41pm and I have every intention of getting a few more things done before shutting down. (“My name is Melissa, and I’m a stay-up-late-aholic.”)

Plus there’s the reminder that when things are moving in the right direction, the Universe tends to send rewards.

Next Steps

Reviews! I’m dying to start writing my reviews! Plus a sales page for the WordPress website services.

And of course my mile-long to-do list…

Meanwhile, I’m trudging along with my marketing education, and perhaps most important of all, slowly losing the urgency around reading/studying/following everyone and everything out there.

Which is a blog post of its own waiting to be written.

Onward!