jdgarrison's Friends

teriel

5:01PM - My travails with travel

So yesterday morning I left PDX at 7:45 am and flew to DC. A very uneventful flight.

little did I know it would take longer to get from D.C. to Savannah Georgia than the PDX flight. The flight to Savannah was delayed because of some mechanical issue. So we waited and waited and waited (I'm thinking about 3 hours) and eventually they tell us that the mechanical issue is fixed, but they need to get someone to sign off on the paperwork. So we waited and waited and waited for about another 2 hours for someone to sign paperwork. Then they tell us we can board...

So we go to board and we're waiting in this little covered which is rather cold...and then they tell us to go back in. Why?

At first we're told its the paperwork. It hasn't been signed...Then it's a mechanical issue again.

So another hour later we get redirected to a new gate and we wait another hour, before finally boarding. And then they do a baggage check and realize that they don't have our backage, so they go fix that...so another half hour before the plane leaves.

We fly to Savannah and when they land, they tell us the docking platform isn't working like they thought. So we wait for about another 20 or so minutes and they finally get a stairway so we can leave the plane.

The one thing I did notice was that everyone who was waiting started to help each other out and talk...I made a few connections...and as one person put it we became united against United.

So I waited six or so hours and finally got in at 12:30

It was, needless to say, epic Fail, especially the paperwork excuse.

teriel

12:42PM - Business doesn’t stop for the Holidays

Originally published at Imagine Your Reality. Please leave any comments there.

I read a post from Chris Brogan about how he wasn’t stopping his business, just because it was the holidays. I happen to agree with Chris. I haven’t stopped posting blog entries or engaging in all the other business activities just because the holidays are here. In fact, while I’m visiting my family, I’ll be writing the drafts of the blogs posts for the last week of December, so that when I get back, I can post those blog entries as well. For the small business owner, business never stops. While larger businesses are shutting down and employees are relaxing a bit, I and other small business owners are focusing on continuing to do business.

Truth to tell, I use the holidays to do an assessment of my business, get my office and paperwork in order, and get ready for filing taxes. And even when I’m on holiday, I’ll be going through the mileage book, adding up totals for each month so I have that deduction prepped. My point is that business doesn’t stop, just because its the holiday.

Recently, I’ve started giving myself one day off each week. I’ve realized if I don’t I’ll burn out. But beyond that, I’m working pretty much every day. The truth is, if you’re an entrepreneur, your business is your life, at least for the first few years, and maybe even after, in terms of the time commitment involved. Owning a business is a lot of work and if you want it to succeed, you’ve got to be prepared to put the time in to make it a success.

So business doesn’t stop for the holidays. It might slow down some, which just means its an excellent time to get to some of those business task you’ve been putting off. But business doesn’t stop and in truth while your clients may not be as active, you can’t afford not to be. So if you’re tempted to give yourself a bit of time off, remember you’ll have to work twice as hard to make up for it. I’m not saying don’t enjoy the holidays, either, but I am saying keep focused on your business as well. Get some of those tasks done that you know you need to get finished.

What do all of you think? What will you do to keep yourself focused on business?

teriel

10:11PM - Future obsession, present awareness

Originally published at Magical Experiments. Please leave any comments there.

The present unfolds when a need is met that previously was bothering you to the point of obsession. The shift of energy away from that place of obsession frees up awareness of the present and can help a person get more focused on living in the present. When you have an obsession, you’re always living in the future, living in that moment of imagining what will happen when the obsession is realized. Nothing else exists after that moment and in many ways nothing exists before it.

A person living in the present is likely free of such obsessions. S/he is living in the moment, hopefully aware of multiple possibilities, but not overly attached to any specific outcome. This occurs when we can leave behind the focus on the future and/or have the obsessions that fuel the focus on the future met. The clarity that results when those obsessions are realized is a clarity of purpose and awareness, for those obsessions no longer occupy your thoughts or emotions, freeing both resources up. The issue then is can a person keep those resources for the present or have them snapped up into the future?

teriel

9:47AM - Bad social media behavior

Originally published at Imagine Your Reality. Please leave any comments there.

Success with social media isn’t just learning how to use the technology to communicate with people. As people learn how to use the technology, they may feel they’ve mastered social media, but in truth successfully using social media is more subtle than that. The reality is that social media isn’t the technology we use, but the social behaviors we engage in while using that technology. The technology is the interface, but the success is the social behaviors. The following are some social behaviors that aren’t successful.

Sending mass invites out for your events. I’ve been guilty of this behavior myself, and it’s not a very successful social media behavior. For one thing, if you send mass invites out to everyone what will happen is you will annoy the people that the invite doesn’t apply to and they will be less inclined to interact with you as a result. You will get emails requesting that you take them off your events list.

Posting or tweeting with links to your website, and no other kind of interaction. No one likes being advertised to and when the only message you send out is a tweet or post with a link to your website or blog, people will feel that you are just trying to get them to your website without genuinely engaging them. Your messages will come off as advertisements, which is the least level of engagement possible.

Sending automatic DM’s to people. Sending an automatic direct message, especially with a link comes off as insincere and suggests that you’re trying to get something from your followers. It starts the relationship out on the wrong foot and leads people to feel that you don’t want to get to know them.

Sending the standard, generic invite when you want to connect with someone. When I get an invitation from Linkedin, where the person hasn’t taken time to personalize it and indicate why they want to connect with me, or how they met me, I feel like that person hasn’t made the effort to establish a reason for why I should connect with that person.

Not taking time to acknowledge or respond to people’s efforts to help you. It doesn’t take much to acknowledge someone retweeting you or otherwise helping you out. When you don’t it comes off as rude and inconsiderate of the effort other people made.

These are just a few bad social media behaviors. What are some you’ve observed, or maybe even done yourself?

teriel

5:25PM - Latest releases from Immanion press

Originally published at Magical Experiments. Please leave any comments there.

Immanion Press/Megalithica Books would like to announce its two newest nonfiction releases! We now have both of these books in stock here at the Green Wolf, so here’s the official announcement.

Women’s Voices in Magic edited by Brandy Williams is a phenomenal collection of essays from female occultists and magicians. People often think of female magical practitioners as mainly witches and neopagans, and the areas of ceremonial and chaos magic as more male-dominated. The essayists in this collection would like to disagree, some politely, some not! We discuss everything from our historical predecessors to the effects pregnancy has on magic, dealing with discrimination by other occultists for our sex, and how we work to change the assumptions that are made about us. Click here for more details, including a list of essays, and ordering info!

As for our other release–chaos magic has been around for a few decades now, and some would argue that it’s long since gone stale, assimilated into a more mainstream, image-oriented form of occultism. Liber 767 vel Boeingus by Josef Karika takes chaos magic back to its exploratory, experimental, and lovingly irreverent roots. Based on the author’s fifteen years of practical experience, and written with a good dose of humor, this text includes a wide variety of ideas for magical practice, from new takes on sigils and servitors and technological magic, to innovative ways to work with memories and dopplegangers. Here’s where you can find more info, and place your order!

teriel

1:25PM - panthea-con

So I will be at panethea-con. Lupa and I will be hosting the Immanion press author panel again this year and I may or may not be teaching a class on Space/Time magic. Yes, I said may or may not, because while P-con did accept it, I've also made a special request in regards to it that I'm waiting to hear back on. Can't say anything about it now.

teriel

11:10AM - How you can prepare your business for the new year

Originally published at Imagine Your Reality. Please leave any comments there.

2010 is just around the bend and in the midst of all the holiday merriment it can be easy to forget the necessity of preparing your business for the 2010 year until after the holidays are done, but you don’t want to wait that long. The following tips will help you prepare for the next year, while still enjoying the end of this year.

First and foremost, spend some time defining your goals for the next year. What is it you want to accomplish with your business? Be specific as possible with your goals. Then define the actions you need to take with the same amount of specificity. Are there areas of your business that you want to improve on?

Second, Take some time to organize your finances for 2009. Make sure your receipts are put into chronological order and grouped into specific categories so you can make it easy to determine your deductions for taxes, but also so that if the IRS contacts you, the receipts are easy to deal with in the case of an audit.

Third, Spend some time assessing your business and what it accomplished over the course of 2009. Did you reach all your goals? Were there some things you could’ve done differently? What did you learn that you can apply to the coming year?

These are a just few things you can do to prep for 2010, while also learning from 2009. Take some time to do these tips and you will find that 2010 will be a great start.

teriel

1:30AM - Group time vs Individual Time

Originally published at Magical Experiments. Please leave any comments there.

I got into a really interesting metaphysical tonight with my friends about group time vs individual time. I was describing to them some of my paratheatre work with time and we got to talking about the difference between Western time, which is monochronic and this very scheduled and linear with one thing happening at a time and polychronic time where lots of things could be happening at the same time and its very non-linear with little in the way of scheduling.

Then I began thinking about group time, time which is created when a group starts meeting and working together. It’s a kind of sacred time in its own way. When I interact with a group, the experience of time changes quite a bit because of the group interaction, but also because I’m no longer in individual time, time spent with just myself. And I notice with group time it is different because with interaction of other people, the sense of time changes. It feels like the moment lasts longer, instead of with individual time, where the awareness of time is based more on solo activity and when those activities are finished.

It’s an interesting realization and it speaks to some degree to the efficacy of group time, because everyone participating in a group is also participating in the experience of time in that group. The contribution of each person’s awareness of time creates the experience of group time an consequentlly can alter the awareness of the flow of time.

teriel

2:07PM - Developing your goals for 2010

Originally published at Imagine Your Reality. Please leave any comments there.

It’s the holiday season and now might seem like a good time take a rest from your business, but before you go to lots of holiday parties and drink lots of eggnog, take a moment to think about defining your business goals for the first quarter of 2010. Yes, only the first quarter, because realistically a lot will change in three months for you.

When I talk about goals, I’m not talking about new years resolutions which are vague and abstract. I’m talking about a defined end result and an action that helps you achieve that end result. I’m talking about picking out specific business activities that your business engages in and defining actions that helps you reach end goals for each of those activities. A business activity could be networking, marketing, social media, customer service, etc. You will ideally know what your business activities are.

For each business activity, first rate your level of satisfaction with that area. a 1 indicates you have a lot of work to do and a 7 indicates that you are doing just about everything you can and its working great.

After determining the level of satisfaction, you’ll next want to think about where you would like to be with that business activity in 3 months. What would the end results be. An end result needs to be measurable so you should have an idea of what results you would like to accomplish.

Next you need to determine what action you will take to help you achieve that end result. The action needs to be targeted and specific to the business activity.

Here’s a goal I have for the next three months

Business Activity: Services and Products

End result: I want my clients to be able to sign up for classes without me having to email them.

Action: Learn how to use auto-responders and integrate them into my website and event announcements.

A specific result and a specific action. Now apply that same approach to your goals. Of course setting goals is wonderful…following through is another matter, so make sure you can follow through by not just writing the goal, but putting it somewhere you can see it everyday.

teriel

10:20PM - Some musings on time

Originally published at Magical Experiments. Please leave any comments there.

First, the latest issue of Rending the Veil is available. I’ve read a few of the articles and it looks good.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about some of my recent work with time, particularly the concept of being present in the future without focusing on the future. In some cultures that standard of time is actually part of their perception of it, but in Western culture, there is an emphasis on the future and on sharply regulating time. Edward Hall provides excellent examples of this in the Dance of Life, and I’ve found his observations to be sound.

I’ll admit I’ve struggled with just being present in the moment. It’s such a foreign experience of time that it feels counter-intuitive, yet I also know it offers something valuable to me, because it allows me to work with a different understanding of time. And the moments when I can get into that place of just being present has its own value because I’m much more aware of the possibilities in those moments than I previously was. I’ve realized that the tendency to focus on the future, to fixate on it, can become an obsession, and is one that many people indulge in without fully appreciating that reality.

I do think there’s value in being able to focus on the future and on desired goals you want to achieve, but I’ve also come to realize there’s value in being in the moment and being open to what is available to you. Too often that can be ignored because of a focus on the future. My challenge has been to be more aware of the moment I’m in. Sometimes it’s worked and other times, not so much, but undoing the cultural perspective on time that’s been held for over 30 years of my life is pretty challenging, so I’m not expecting over night success. Just trying it is more important than anything else, because I’m being open to the experience.

teriel

11:15AM - Nobody likes an infomercial

Originally published at Imagine Your Reality. Please leave any comments there.

One of the common mistakes I see on different social networking sites is a tendency toward sending out a stream of advertisements, in what is often a vain hope of attracting business. The reason it’s vain is that every single tweet is driven toward a goal of getting a sale as opposed to providing genuine and useful information. It should be obvious that social networks aren’t sales platforms, but many businesses try to treat them that way.

The reason this occurs is fairly simple. They are too busy thinking of the bottom line, of trying to make money, to consider the process by how that actually occurs. Instead businesses use social networks without a clear understanding of what the technology allows them to do. In fact, the tendency is ultimately to focus on the technology, without recognizing what the technology does: Namely connect us closer to other people.

Nobody likes an infomercial, so when put your status updates and tweets out there, spend a moment reading what you wrote and ask yourself, from the perspective of a reader, whether you would actually be interested in the message, whether it would actually speak to you. If it doesn’t for you, why would it for anyone else?

Look through your last thirty or so tweets and then ask yourself how many responses either on twitter or on your website you got from those tweets. If there’s no traffic and no responses then you have to question whether the activity is really productive. In fact, it isn’t productive if you aren’t getting a response.

Spending time looking at what you’ve written can help you determine if you are treating your audience like people, or like sales numbers. Can you guess how your audience would prefer to be treated?

teriel

4:00PM - The value of documenting your processes

Originally published at Imagine Your Reality. Please leave any comments there.

Recently I’ve started offering a new package with my business services, which focuses on helping business automate what they do. It helps a business owner remove the overthink out of their process. It also helps a business owner create an objective record of the processes that can be passed onto someone who might buy the business.

The real value of documenting your process however is that it clears up the mental  clutter in your mind. It can be very easy to get mentally cluttered when you haven’t documented the process for how you accomplish a specific task. When I document a task, I find it gives me clarity, helps me understand the purposes for doing something, and stops me from overthinking it.

Documenting a process doesn’t have to be elaborate. It can be as simple as listing the desired results and then listing the steps taken to get to those results. But what does help is that as you write it out and later as you test your process, you will find that you’ll be able to eliminate steps that aren’t needed, as well as refine what is needed. You can test what you do against what you’ve written and determine what you are doing that is productive as well as what isn’t productive.

Documenting a process isn’t just putting it on paper. It’s getting the process out of your head and into a space where you can objectively observe it and change it as needed, and consequently change your activities so that they are productive and focused, and also automated.

teriel

3:38PM - Social Media Coach Radio: How to use Facebook

Originally published at Imagine Your Reality. Please leave any comments there.

The latest Social Media Coach radio show is up. Go here to listen to it! In it, I discuss how to use facebook successfully.

The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber

This is a must-read book for anyone who wants to be a small business owner or is one and is frustrated by the lack of success they might be experiencing. Gerber lays out what the issues are for why business fail and also what business owners need to do to address those issues. Gerber’s suggestions are practical and very useful. The concept of systematization for a business is ultimately a very useful idea and one more businesses need to implement. This book gets you started on learning how to do that.

5 out 0f 5

Upcoming classes

Social Media Webinar: How do I use Twitter for my Business?
When: Dec 18th, Noon to 1pm PST,  From the comfort of your office or home
Register, go to http://www.imagineyourreality.com/Events.html

Social Media Webinar: How do I use Biznik for my Business?

When: Dec 18th, 2pm to 3pm PST, From the comfort of your office or home

Register, go to http://www.imagineyourreality.com/Events.html

teriel

11:16AM - The increasing importance of social media behavior

Originally published at Imagine Your Reality. Please leave any comments there.

While social media technology continues to develop apace, what is becoming more important than the technology itself, is the behavior all of us engage in as we use social media. Almost from the beginning there has been expected protocol as well as ideas as to what people should or shouldn’t tweet about, but at the same time, for the most part, social networking is fairly unregulated when it comes to what people say and do. And in many ways this is a good thing, as such regulation would take away from the spirit of social networking. At the same time, social networking communities are self-policing to a degree, and this is made more helpful when you can indicate if someone is spamming you.

However an actual focus on successful social media behavior and what that means is something which is only now beginning to be focused on. Sure we have our social media strategies which explain how to use twitter or Facebook or other sites to get people interested in doing business with us, but there hasn’t been much focus on behavior. Successful social media behavior ultimately needs to look beyond the marketing and networking to the actual connection that social media enables.

What does it mean to follow someone? What issues arise when you unfollow someone? These aren’t questions, which are really asked, in part because its not something that is thought to be asked about. And ultimately by virtue of sheer numbers is not something that might be considered relevant. But as social networks evolve and as use of the technology become more sophisticated, questions of what constitutes successful social media behavior will need to be addressed.

Social media is more than technology. It’s behavior and connection, as well. It is people sharing their lives with each other, their needs, their problems, and everything else. We need to respect that even as we learn the technology.

teriel

1:17PM - Removing the overthink from your business

Originally published at Imagine Your Reality. Please leave any comments there.

Many business owners spend too much time over thinking what they do, when it comes to handling the details of running a business. This occurs because a business owner will keep all of these details in his/her head. Consequently there will be a lot of over thinking, in part because there isn’t a clear process documented that explains what the business owner or an employee should or shouldn’t be doing.

A big reason that franchise businesses such as McDonald’s do so well is that they remove the possibility of overthink from the equation of running a business. They make new franchise owners attend a special series of classes that walk them through how to run a business. They also document every single process for the business. That way the business owner and employees can refer to those processes at any time to handle a situation that occurs. The entire business of running a McDonald’s is systematized.

Most business owners don’t have a McDonalds guidebook to support them. Instead what most business owners need to do is start documenting the processes and systems for how they run their businesses. This means defining what the end results of a given process is and then writing out the steps involved to obtain those end results.

By writing a process out, you now objectify the process, making it much easier to avoid overthinking what you are doing. You can change the process easily now, but since you aren’t keeping it in your head, it actually becomes easier to implement it, without overthinking it. In fact, once it’s on paper, it’s no longer really in mind, because you now have given it a physical placeholder, which you can revisit at anytime, but without the complication of having only an abstract idea of how that process works.