Passion Power

When I first started writing I didn’t understand the plight of a writer.  I thought it was just me.  Writer’s block.  Hell ya.  Who do you think you are writing?  Nobody wants to read your shit.  Writers have one thing in common. They don’t write. Many of us give up before we let that happen.  Before we even start we’ve packed it in. Martha Graham wrote “we are never satisfied with our work.  Creative work is a queer divine dissatisfaction that keeps us marching and more alive than the others.”  This speaks right to me.  There is no satisfaction at anytime even after you’ve arrived and I’m strangely comforted by this. Anne Lamott teaches us to write short assignments shitty first drafts and look through 1 inch picture frames.  We do that for awhile and it seems to settle us down a bit until the next storm hits.   “How’s the writing” someone says so innocently.   I hesitate to call myself a writer because i...

Introduction..   I'm sharing the very best of what I know with you in this article.  I stumbled into my first sales job 20 years ago.   I started out as an administrative assistant for a leasing company.   They still had carbon copies back then, (wow.  I'm old)  and I was a terrible typist.  I had already gotten fired from my first job as a Dictaphone typist for making too many errors.   I was let go from another job because I was unwilling to go down the elevator, stand in line at Druxy's sandwich shop and purchase lunch each day for the gentleman I worked for.  He was one of the Partners in a large accounting firm downtown.  They had two coffee breaks  each day in which one of the girls, (thank God it wasn't me) had to go around with a cart to all the offices and offer the Partner's  coffee;   I believe there was 11 of them.  The coffee was poured to their liking and delivered r...

One day your life just takes a completely different turn.  One partner doesn’t want to work on the marriage anymore.  They bail.  Give up for whatever reason.  Stop pretending you didn’t know it was a possibility that your marriage could end in divorce.  Statistics don’t lie.  It won’t happen to our love should be replaced with,  it could happen to our love. Here are 7 things I’ve learned about divorce. 1.      You become strangers quicker than you thought possible and everything you thought you knew about the other person was a lie. Your best friend becomes your enemy.  Pulling in the driveway feels uncomfortable so you park on the street. The person you slept beside is no longer allowed off the mat in your entranceway. 2.     You can’t control how your ex handles the divorce.   Why can’t we be friends?   Because it doesn’t work that way. How was your day is a loaded question now....

Sales is really quite simple and not nearly as frightening as some people think. If you’re a new business owner or just starting out in sales you may be feeling a little intimidated by the sales activities involved in promoting your product or service but don’t sweat the sales stuff.  You just have to get a list together of why your service or product is of value to your prospect and be willing to promote it.  Always be willing to answer this question; what’s in it for them?  You need a straight forward and honest approach when prospecting. You have to be naturally confident.  Pull it off something like this, “Here’s what we offer. This is what we do really well.  Here’s what’s excellent about our products. Here’s the value for you and this is how much it costs.”  Everyone can relax when there are no games being played. I like to teach salespeople 3 things.  Establish Key Players . If you don’t talk to the decision maker you’ll waste a lot of t...

It’s a great way to control what they say about you.  While you decide for yourself whether it’s an outlandish, morbid or self absorbed idea, here's mine.  Mom’s going to miss rainstorms and the smell of warm scented wax.  She’ll miss fighting with my dad whether to open the windows or turn on the air conditioner. One day she drove us to school and realized we weren’t in the car.   Mom loved herself and never apologized for it.  She had so many passions and interests it was hard for her to pick so she didn’t.  She just did them all.  When driving us around she would point at trees, flowering bushes or a beautiful orange sky and would practically run us off the road. We use to yell at her. I kind of regret that little now. When we were 2 and 3 years old she took us to McDonalds.  Amy got stuck in the tube slide at the very top the same time Kay bolted across the busy restaurant in her red rain boots heading for the toilet and disappe...

I went to find something to watch the other night.  Every type of violence you can imagine was on the menu; human trafficking, terrorists, torture, shootings, rape, revenge, kidnapping, serial killers, bombs and guns.  There are forests that aren’t as shady as some of these shows.   I might never recover and I just read the titles.  Am I the only one that thinks all this violence isn’t making us feel safe in the world?  Are we corrupting our kid’s impressionable minds exposing them to such gore?  Does it desensitize them to actual pain and suffering?  Ok, I’ll get off my soapbox. I remember my daughters started watching Criminal Minds and suddenly I’m waking up to a large teenager sleeping in my bed.  The media bombards us with violence every day – It’s a competitive industry and violence sells so they shove it down our throats.  Of course we’re saddened and outraged when it happens for real yet it’s not enough.  We nee...

I watched someone check Facebook during a business meeting the other day.  I felt so insignificant and unimportant I wanted to throw my hands up in the air.  We’re acting like a bunch of teenagers; drunk on cell phone drama convinced it’s more important than the people right in front of us.  If I’m standing with someone using their device I don’t automatically assume they`re being rude.  Something really important has to be happening on their phone.  I don’t think it’s anti-social or socially awkward or impolite.  They could be running a huge multi-national business or helping a friend off the ledge or maybe their house is on fire.  It`s lovely to remain in touch with people we don`t see but are we talking to the people who live in the same house or sleep in the same bed.  Cell phones don’t belong in the boardroom at the dinner table or in the classroom yet it`s the new normal.  I think society is moving in the wrong direction with v...