Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals: Blonde Don’t Live Here No More
Hey!
Thanks for coming back. It's great to see you again!
Have you started your '30 Days to Renaissance' journey yet? See the sidebar to sign up.
Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals – BHAGs. These are the stuff entrepreneurial dreams are made of. BHAGs are motivating, 
inspiring, and often take more than a minute or two to complete. In fact, sometimes it can take years to bring a BHAG to fruition.
But there’s an even bigger, more hairy audacious obstacle that prevents many entrepreneurs from ever attaining their BHAG.
Distractions. Entrepreneurs have a horrible time with this. We’re constantly distracted by the ideas that float into our brains. Great ideas, though they may be, we’re often found floating from idea to idea, never really completing anything.
Several terms have been concocted to describe this condition. Shiny object syndrome is a pervasive problem amongst entrepreneurs. According to one study, about 50% of entrepreneurs demonstrate ADHD tendencies, and becoming distracted is a big issue.
So if you have big, clearly defined goals, what can you do to stay on track?
For me, it took dying my hair a bright, shiny, platinum blonde color.
From This...
To This
I took a LOT of flak for this change. And the comments (to my face) ranged from “Oh GAWD! What were you thinking?” to “Wow! You look AMAZING!” – and everything in between. I can only imagine some of the snickering that went on behind closed doors.
Deciding to go blonde had nothing to do with having more fun, or really even about being more visible – although those were possible side effects. For me, there was a deeper meaning to embracing my “inner blonde”.
It was a constant, daily reminder of three BHAGs I needed to accomplish in my life.
Every morning I wake up, I look in the mirror and see this face, surrounded by this hair – an unavoidable reminder of things left undone. Things that MUST be completed before my hair goes back to a more, um, natural shade.
I could have chosen a less outspoken color, but part of the shift that needed to happen in me was being able to embrace my outspoken nature. And the other goals I’ll talk more about at my live event this fall.
Some people can use a vision board, or write it down, or do a daily visualization and consistently hold those goals in their mind. Some people can plug it into a computer, a PDA or have someone else hold them accountable. I’m not one of those people. Ink washes away. Strings break. Kids spill stuff on your PDA, delete your hard drive, and decide to color on your vision board.
I needed something indelible. Something that wouldn’t rub off, wash off, or get lost in the translation. So about this time last year, I made the leap from dark brown to blonde (with a pit stop at orange. There’s a picture somewhere on Facebook, I think. It’s horrible.).
In the intervening year, my “daily reminder” was met by occasional snide remarks – even from family and friends. The suggestions to “pick a more flattering color”, the questioning, and the outright assumptions on the part of most people were more examples of how people don’t always ‘get it’ when we want to accomplish something huge. Sometimes our closest friends think they’re doing us a favor. They think they’re being supportive, but in reality, they’re trying to fit our BHAG into their world. People don’t understand (or care to understand) the motivation behind the transformation, they only judge the outward manifestation of the first step.
Crazy? Silly? Stupid? Unflattering? Perhaps. But I didn’t go blonde to please you. I didn’t even do it to please me.
The thing about changing your hair color to something VERY different from your natural color is that it requires work to maintain. You can’t just quit when the going gets tough – or another distraction comes along.
When the roots come in, you’ve got to decide to keep going or go back. Cut it off or let it grow. For me, this was a very visceral, tangible, and physical manifestation of my business and personal goals.
Do I quit just because it’s hard? Just because I haven’t reached my goal yet?
Do I cut myself off just because other people are telling me it can’t be done – or that I’m too (old, fat, young, smart, dumb, poor, educated, etc.)?
Do I keep going, or go back?
I chose (and continue to choose) to ‘let it grow’.
A couple of weeks ago, I hit goal number one of three. So blonde don’t live here no more.
My target is to complete goals two and three so that this whole “hairy goal” thing is ironed out by August – and settle on the final hair color for the rest of my 30′s.
Or until my next BHAG comes into view.
Sorry Seth, I Have to Disagree…
One of my favorite authors in my known galaxy is Seth Godin. He’s a proliferate pontificate on marketing, life, and other good stuff.
Today marks the first day in my LIFE that I think the man is stright up wrong and needs a brick upside his head.
And that could just be because my life experience is markedly different than his. Who knows.
In a recent post about why you should, or shouldn’t write a book, Seth makes a fatal generalization.
He says “Out of context, a 140 character tweet cannot change someone’s life.”
WRONG and WRONG.
I have never felt my skin crawl faster. And I LOVE Seth’s work. Really. I do!
I have read brilliant tweets. Short snippets from friends and strangers that have made course corrections in my own life.
Some had only the context of knowing the author (thank you @unmarketing, @chrisbrogan, @lkr, @elizabethPW, @tomziglar) – so by knowing them to some degree, I suppose that changes the “context” of things.
But others (because I occasionally DO read my ‘all tweets’ stream) were random people that I may or may know have any inkling of that said something funny, emotionally charged, or just made a life-altering statement.
Usually in 120 characters or less, because that way you can re-tweet.
And dear Mr. Godin, if you ever USED twitter, you might understand that.
I guess the thing that irritates me is also the salve to soothe me. See Seth has never used twitter, so his sideways assessment makes sense. He’s a writer/blogger at heart, so of course he’d make the assertion that blogs impact lives.
But to summarily write off a medium you’ve never used (except to broadcast his posts – I’ll get back to that in a minute), is a disservice to his readers.
One of the things that set me apart early on as a coach was that I didn’t spout off about things I didn’t understand. If I didn’t have wordpress experience, I didn’t talk about how great it was to my clients. I stuck to what I knew. When I fell in love with twitter, I shared with my clients how I was picking up THOUSANDS of dollars in my business because of it – and HOW I was doing it.
But NEVER (at least not that I can recall) have I ‘coached’ someone to do something that I hadn’t tried myself in some way.
And sorry, Seth, but I think this is a place where you have no leg to stand on. You’ve never used twitter as more than a placeholder or a broadcast mechanism for your blog – which is like being part of the twitter counterculture.
That said, I also want to point out how your one tweet (which was nothing more than a broadcast of your latest blog post), which included a link DID change me. your shiny veneer isn’t quite what it once was. Now, you could assert that because it was a blog link, that there’s a context to it, and that’s true. Perhaps if you actually used twitter, I could comment more accurately.
But there are other folks, like @ThomScott or @sundaycosmetics, @retrobakery who I either barely know or don’t know at all that just happened to post a thoughtful tweet one day, intrigued me, and pulled me into their universe. That’s the grand design of twitter. How can you say that DOESN’T change your life? I purposely linked to these folks because chances are good most of my readers have never heard of them either. Heck, I just read my first post by @retrobakery this morning. But it was enough to engage me and change me.
And yes, you could say that I’m spouting off about the value of my medium (twitter), just as Seth is spouting off about his medium (books). The difference is I’m not slamming his – even incidentally. And I HAVE written books. Working on two new ones now.
Seth is correct that “you must create enough leverage to make things happen” But it’s erroneous to assume that everyone needs a counterweight the size of Mount Olympus to move the load. Some of us can get by with less than 140 characters.
It depends on your definition of “enough”, I suppose.
Diagnosis: You and Fear
In working with my inaugural class of clients for The Power of Focus project, the biggest reports coming in from the field show that fear keeps rearing it’s ugly head.
“Am I doing this right?”
“How do I know if I’m doing this right?”
That old demon, fear is rearing it’s ugly head again, tyring to keep you from realizing your greatness.
The fact is, the only way to know if you’re doing anything right is by actually doing it! Otherwise, you’re not doing ANYTHING!
It struck a chord when I read Seth Godin’s blog this morning. Read Everything Is Not Going To Be Okay and you’ll understand what I mean.
We all walk around wondering, hoping and wishing for someone to tell us that we’re on the right path – and that we’re doing the right thing.
As moms, we’re especially vulnerable. I remember when I first brought my son home from the hospital (who’s now a teenager). I said to my friends, “I wish babies came with instruction manuals.”
I was met with comforting words and encoruagement that I was “going to be a great mom.” and that I “would know what to do instinctively.”
They were wrong.
I struggled and struggled at trying to figure out how to be a mom. It’s like pouring salt on a snail and watching him shrivel up. That’s how I felt each and every day of his young life. I wasn’t prepared for 2am feedings when I had to be to work the next day. I didn’t understand why I had to pay for a week of day care if teh kid was only there for three days. There was so much that was pretty much left to chance when my son was small that I began to feel like I was doing everything wrong.
So I came home, where my family offered a modicum of support.
Whether that was “the best” choice or not, I’ll never know, but it was the only one I felt I had at the time. Doing what you believe to be right in the moment is sometimes all you have to go on. Questioning that decsion only leads to indecision, stagnation, and more fear.
What happened when I returned? It was like being a child all over again – being told what to do and how I was doing everything wrong. I remember one of my aunts telling me my child would end up in prison if I kept on raising him the way I was.
Of course, that was before his diagnosis. Before the diagnosis, I was viewed as a horrible mother with a problem child. After the diagnosis, I was “doing the best I could in a situation with a special needs child”.
Funny how the dime turned, huh? I thought so, anyway.
So here’s your diagnosis: You’re doing the best you can in your given situation. Don’t let the unknowing, disapproving looks from family or friends screw with your brain. You’ll never know if what you’re doing is the perfect solution to any problem until the end of time, when you look back and assess the full value of the life you’ve lived. If you spend all your time now wondering, you’ll never live the life you were called to fulfill.
Fear likes to keep you in a space where it thinks you’re safe. Hey, you’re not dead yet, so you must be doing okay. That’s hogwash. Fear doesn’t understand that you need to take a step or a leap out of your “comfort zone” to be the person - the mom, the busness owner – you truly want to be. It only understands that you’re trying something new, something it hasn’t experienced before, and what if everything isn’t okay?
It won’t be okay. It will be uncomfortable at best and excruciatingly painful at worst. Just know it, accept it, and plow through. There’s fear in the doing, but most often, hen we come out on the other side of the doing, we are much better for the experience.
I don’t make this stuff up, folks: Chicago, the Musical
The show’s over, and we’ve got a get-together tonight as one of our castmembers moves across the state for a new job. But a few people asked, so here’s a link to the
review for Chicago, the Musical.
Overture… Curtain lights… Chicago!
So in my mad ramblings, I don’t talk too much about my personal life. I figure there’s more important stuff going on in the world besides me.
But today, I’m sharing pictures from a recent birthday party.
What makes this party so unique is that the attendees were, for the most part, cast member from a local production of the musical, Chicago.
One cast member, Aaron, celebrated his 20th birthday and invited all of us cast folk to join in the soiree. He’s the Blonde in that first picture, standing next to Anthony.
It was such a blast to see the cast reunite for something like this. We spent a few months together working our BUTTS off for this production. Choreography was tough – at least for locals that haven’t had a dance class in eons. Music was challenging, but we were blessed with some very talented cast members that could out-sing some of the greats on the karaoke stage – and some of us really tried, believe me.
So we ate, drank and had pickles – it’s a tradition, the pickles. You’ll have to ask me about it sometime.
But why is this in a Marketing Blog, you ask? Well, a couple of reasons. This blog also doubles as an occasionally personal blog (deal with it), and because it emphasizes what a good story (Chicago), a loyal customer base (the cast and crew), and a powerful product (Vertigo Theatrics) can bring about.
Ted, the guy that runs the show over there, is really a humble giant of a guy. In our many conversations, one of the things that he’s touched on is the fear that he’s not making a difference in the lives of people in our area. Now I’ve worked with Ted on several other productions where the cast and crew become close in an almost magical way, but he always wrote it off as a fluke. Well, I think the third time’s not a coincidence: it’s what makes a good theater company GREAT:
Jen and Steve, to my knowledge, have never done a show together before. This show stretched Steve in a leading role. Jen had to dig deep for some amazing choreography. This show really brought them together and gave them a new “thing to do” as husband and wife.
New friendships were forged – some of which transformed lives. People came to this show with broken pieces, and somehow, through the power of theater, shared trials and a good belly laugh, they found themselves on the mend.
Super HEROES came to the rescue. Anthony’s folks gave us an amazing set, and raised the bar for all of Ted’s future productions. And don’t get me started on the amazing job Barb did on the costumes. Selfless giving. Yeah, they’ll say it was because they wanted Anthony’s first production to be spectacular, but few people give of themselves that way for total strangers – even if their kid is involved. And the tireless day-in, day-out work of Ted’s “better half”, Jacque is a testament to the passion they both have for this community.
And me? I just took it all in. Making notes so that Ted couldn’t backpedal on this one. There was so much joy in a room that never would have been there if it weren’t for companies like this, productions like this, and people like Ted and Jacque who found a passion and nurtured it with “Class”.
There were others in this cast of characters that didn’t hang around long enough to pose, and others still that couldn’t make it to this seemingly simple birthday party.
But this was a party unlike most. This was a cast of strangers that became friends for a time, who reunited for one of their own to celebrate, remember, and be grateful. These people have their own paths in life and will take new directions now that the show is over.
But I think it’s safe to say we were ALL transformed by what a little passion can do.
THANKS, TED! And HAPPY BIRTHDAY AARON!
No I didn’t fall in a hole…
I’ve been absolutely swamped with a plethora of new activities to keep me occupied. My eldest is back in school – and already on his first suspension today. Oy.
We just finished Chicago, the musical to RAVE reviews and a sold out house. I ended up doing TRIPLE duty on this show. I had originally signed on to play the role of Matron Momma Morton (yes, the Queen Latifah role, but please do not compare!) and help out as vocal coach for the show. About a week before opening, I was also asked to take over as BAND DIRECTOR.
Talk about a humbling experience. I haven’t directed an instrumental ensemble since my college days. For those of you that think you just wave your arms and music comes out, well, you’re partly right.
I was put in front of some of the best musicians our town has to offer – and to direct Kander and Ebb is no small feat – but with a 5 piece ensemble – and at least ONE of them is a band director himself in real life – and did I mention they were all guys?
Yeah, I felt a wee bit intimidated. I mean, the drummer has played with some of the biggest names in modern rock and roll history. The sax player has more years experience than I have been living on this little rock. And did I mention the trumpeter is classically trained and is the high school band director in a Flint Suburb?
My palms weren’t just sweaty because it was hot on that stage.
Opening night was more of a trial by fire for me than anything else I’ve experienced in my life. In my two (Count ‘em TWO) conducting classes I had at college – only ONE was for instrumental music – I was taught the very rudimentary basics of conducting:
1. Mark the score for changes in tempo, key, mood, etc.
2. Analyze the music to know what’s going on where (see #1 if you’re unclear)
3. Note any cues
4. Practice conducting the music BEFORE your do it in front of your ensemble.
Well, I could pretty much scrap #4 because I had to jump right in on a dress rehearsal. Being part of the musical already was helpful because I already knew some of the music, but the incidental, between scene music (walk-offs, etc) I had never heard before, and well, let’s just say I’m not the world’s greatest sight-reader.
So I over counted, gave too many prep beats, and tried to be OVER helpful with my band. Some of the guys didn’t mind, but I could tell there was a bit of derision in the ranks.
The whole show was cues – and with actors sometimes coming in on time and sometimes not, it was a new arrangement every night.
And we pulled it off to thunderous applause every single night.
But the guys who deserve the applause sat behind that bandstand. I waved my arms, and THEY made me look good.
And now that it’s over, I’m glad – and I’m gonna miss ‘em.
Tom, Frank (and Glenn for one night only), Larry, Gary and Chris: Y’all rock. Thanks for helpin’ a girl overcome herself.
But next time, I want more notice.