Coach2Accomplish Logo

This week I would like to do something a little different. Coach2Accomplish needs a logo and I would like to get your opinion on the logos that I came up with. Please be brutally honest, no one's feelings will get hurt. The point here is to get your reaction and that should not be censored! I had one purpose in mind when crafting the logos, to convey a sense of achievement, building or moving towards a goal. So comment on what you do, or don't like (color, design). The new, chosen logo will be making it's debut in next week's blog and website.

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May I have my Day Back ... Please?

Who knew that this was going to be such a crazy week? Apparently not me! I had 2 days swept right from under me and found myself wishing I had a clone.

You see this is what Tuesday would have looked like if I had some great clones: Fez 1 would have gone to the dreaded infusion and sat with an IV for 6 hours at the doctor's office; Fez 2 would work and Fez 3 would pick up the kids at the bus stop and show them a jolly old time after a hard day at school. Instead since cloning is still a little hard to come by, I ended up at the doctor's all day, sent the kids to the after school program and even had to ask saint Brenda to pick them up. No work! This is despite having seen this as a great opportunity to work, only to find out there is zero phone reception and no wireless network at the doctor's office. I am reminded of the Yiddish proverb "We plan, God laughs".

Okay, then what about Wednesday? Even though I will actually be doing something I enjoy, bible study, with drive time and a spinning class following, I pretty much get home 15 minutes before the bus drops the kids off. No work. So now we move to Thursday and Friday. Why, between center time in one kids class (and then lunch with them after) and reading mom in another class (and then lunch with them after), I will be hard pressed to find 2 uninterrupted hours to do some solid work.

But fear not my dear readers, all is not lost, I have a plan. After all I am a coach! I have established new working hours. Fantastic! This has been made a little easier with my dear husband being out of town, the kids go to bed at 7:30, no questions asked. It's getting dark enough outside, they are easy to fool. Then after clean-up, meditation, book bags, yada yada yada the office is open for business between 9 pm and midnight. Fantastic office hours. An uninterrupted, solid 3 hours.

Question: after anxiously waiting to find a solid three hours to do some work, which did I choose to do? Catch up on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn etc or did I focus on number one goal this week of moving my webhost and launching a new website? I will let the results speak for themselves ...

Why 5 Year Olds Make the Best Sales People

What would school be without the billion +1 fundraisers? It just wouldn't be the same, would it? The kids brought home their first big, main fundraiser for the year and each of them had very different reactions to having to sell the products on the glossy catalogue.

If I were to describe my son, I would say he lacked some social niceties. He isn't rude, he just doesn't feel obligated to greet people, play with other kids on the playground and is quite happy playing on his own and his favorite games are on the computer. So how could I have suspected that he would make a master sales guy? There is a however a certain naivety about his view of the world. He doesn't apply any filters and that works in his favor.

When he got his packet of brochures from his school, he assumed he could walk up to anyone that he knew, and that person would order something. So his question was not "will you buy something from me" it was which one of these would you like to buy? I have cookies, candles, pens ... He would pause as he flipped to his favorite page in the back where he leafed through all the different wrapping paper options. Then he would look earnestly at the person he was talking to, just like you would when you have your pen poised to start taking down an order, and wait to find out what they were buying.

How can you say no, to an earnest pitch like that? The assumption is they wouldn't have given him something to sell that people wouldn't obviously want to buy and personally believed in all the products on the catalogue. The funny thing was, he didn't even buy into the whole incentive scheme they had set up for them at school, he was merely connecting you to the product you always wanted to have.

Here is another noteworthy element of this great sales guy. There were rejections, plenty of them. In fact some people were outright rude and didn't even listen to his whole pitch. What was his reaction? Water off a ducks back. Picked up his brochures and went running off to the next person.

After I saw him at work, I thought to myself ... I want what that little boy has.

Business Lessons from Raising Triplets Part II

It was great thinking back on what a blur the first year of life with the triplets was but it also brought back a lot of great lessons learnt. Make sure you read Part I to get the full list.

1. Some skills we come into the job with, and some we learn on the job

I mentioned in my previous post I was a natural at scheduling things and this was a handy skill to have when trying to make the house run in a somewhat less than chaotic manner. No training required there. When it came to the ins and outs of physically bottle feeding 3 kids (at 3 am in the morning), I had to seek someone who had done this before and learn what the best approach was. It was interesting to hear the different techniques but the one that worked for me, was line them up on pillows, prop a bottle in their mouth and hey presto you could feed three kids at the same time. Now if I had thought long and hard, maybe I could have come up with that on my own, but why to, when someone else already had the knowledge?

2. Get help

For being such independent people for husband and I, this was beyond our comfort zone. You figure there must be someone out there in the world that raised triplets all on their own without help, and so you should be able to do the same. That's probably true. It's also true that they had a very different experience from what we had as a result. Getting the right help allowed us to take a break. One has no idea how exhausting having a baby is, until one has one. This is not one of those things I felt I needed to be a hero about, but I did need to get over my anxieties of being a burden on society and accept the help that people were offering. Before long our fridge was stocked up with all kinds of yummy goodies (that I would have never had the time to prepare), there were people sweeping the floor and the list of just pure generous giving was amazing. There are some things we have the capacity to do and others we need to just ask for help.

3. Take care of yourself

We have such a tendency of taking care of business, which my business then was triplets, than we never consider that we need to take care of ourselves too. This had to be pointed out to us in a rather frank discussion by the team of doctors that were taking care of our children. They saw us just falling apart with the stress and exhaustion of it all and they gently told us to go home and get some rest. I think I needed to hear it from the doctors, for some reason I did not feel I could permit myself to leave the hospital and go take a rest. Unfortunately most of us don't have doctors telling us to take a break and we shouldn't wait till we have run ourselves ragged. Taking care of business includes taking care of you.

4. Pay it forward

Now I sit in my comfortable house almost a million miles from those crazy days and I wonder what can I do to repay all those amazing people that helped us? Pretty simple. I never miss the opportunity to talk to another mom that is going through the same thing. We share our story, resources and anything else we can because we know what it meant to us and so what it means to those parents. We were blessed to be a blessing to others. I see this principle applied in little ways as friends follow other friends on twitter to build up each others networks and as people freely share information they have learnt without expecting anything back. I listen to free recordings all the time of people genuinely trying to save me the time and trouble of making the same mistakes they did in my chosen industry. How cool is that!

What little I have learnt I hope to share with you and perhaps something will strike a chord and be helpful on your journey.