friends | Lisa Robbin Young

Other Gifts

No birthday hangovers here.

In fact, the birthday wasn’t much different from every other day this year. I had promised myself to take the day off, but it just wasn’t very convenient to do so.

So I walked the kid to school, and worked on website issues with my tech team, and dealt with a few “fires” that had to be put out.

It was pretty much an uneventful birthday.

At first, this did not set well with me. See, I’m an action taker – a DO-er – and sitting around NOT doing what I wanted to do kind of pissed me off.

The End of One Journey

Posted by LisaYoung in Faith | 0 comments

I was sitting in my mastermind session with @SarahRobinson, @TamiMorello, and @JudiKnight, over-thinking, as usual. In my mind, I was seeing a skydiver, preparing to jump. Words were swirling in my brain: About changes, and exploration, and things that had to stop, so other things could begin.

Judi started recounting a memory about a need to have time to explore, and figure stuff out before you could take a next step.

And in my brain, the image of a skydiver, timing the opening of his chute, came vividly into view.

See, a jumper can’t pull the rip cord as soon as his feet are clear of the plane.

There has to be some amount of freefall - away from the plane, out into the open. In one respect, freefall is actually a safety mechanism to make sure the jumper is clear of the plane.

Then, when the cord is pulled and the chute begins to open, the jumper is actually lifted up a bit, as the air fills the chute and slows the descent of the jumper.

Pull the cord too soon, and you could get sucked back into the plane’s engines (youch).

Pull the cord too late, and you end up splatted on the ground (double youch!)

Some jumpers count the seconds until the pull. Others enjoy the view on the way down. They explore the feeling of freefall and look around to see what’s on the horizon, etc.

This brought me back to Judi’s comment about needing time to explore.

Essentially, there are times in our journey, when we need to give ourselves permission to explore, to play the field, to experiment and figure stuff out. To try on new hats, and see which ones we like. We need an opportunity to journey our path of trials and see what awaits us.

I remember the scene in “The Princess Bride” when Westley is recounting how he inherited the “Dread Pirate Roberts” title. He shares with Princess Buttercup how he spent 5 years learning “fencing, fighting – anything anyone would teach him” and ultimately assumed the pirate role when his predecessor retired.

While I don’t think I need 5 years, nor do I want to become the Dread Pirate Roberts per se, it is time to assume my new role.

The Renaissance Mom is an important chapter in my journey. It’s my sandbox, my testing ground. It’s the place where I’ve given myself permission to explore, recreate, mold, scratch out and start over. It’s been a sounding board and a haven for the brain bombs that have kept me up and thinking.

There’s a point on every hero’s journey after they cross a threshold that the path of trials starts to come to an end. They’ve figured out how to defeat the giant, and the hero actually starts living the life of a hero. There’s a freedom and even a bit of ease about life again on the other side of the trials.

You need time to ramble and explore, to get bloodied up on the path of trials and test your mettle, if you will. That’s when you find out if you really do have what it takes to be a hero.

The Renaissance Mom has been my outpost, my “three broomsticks”, my refuge between trials, where I could document this journey and hopefully help others along the way.

And now, it’s time for my next Renaissance.

When I created The Renaissance Mom, I didn’t know for sure how it would turn out. I knew I wanted to help entrepreneurs, and I’ve spent the last year working through what that looks like and how the next evolution will manifest itself in the world.

That day is finally here.

No longer will you see me blogging here. The site will remain up through the end of the year, most likely, but no new posts are being planned. Eventually, even the 30 days to Renaissance will fade away.

Instead, I invite you to join me on the next phase of my adventure: Business Action Hero is obviously not a title that will resonate with everyone, but it’s an incredibly accurate representation of where I’m headed next. Having taking the last year to work on my own renaissance, I know it requires action, faith and a bit of heroism to be a business owner. Business Action Hero is my next evolution, and I’ll be there to help other entrepreneurs to become the hero of their own business, and navigate their own journey.

Until we meet again on the journey…

Firing Clients, Friends and Colleagues

Posted by LisaYoung in Big Ideas, Faith | 0 comments

It’s been a whirlwind week for me.

I’m in the throes of the Small Biz Super Summit, along with a new client project, and preparing for the launch of a new division of my business.

And I get an email from a client, angry with me for “violating her privacy”.

The claim was unfounded, and after resolving the misunderstanding, I finally decided to let her go.

Yes, I fired my client.

You are FIRED!

See, there comes a time in your business life where enduring the stress and strain of some clients isn’t worth ANY sum of money. Some of you have heard me say this before, but I wanted to let you know that I still face this issue from time to time – despite my well-crafted Perfect-Fit Customer Profiles.

Not only did this client email me with false accusations, she also launched into a tirade in a group forum of her company, where other people could hear her rant (and later report back to me), but I could not offer the slightest commentary on the situation.

Instead of coming directly to the source of the issue (presumably me), she chose to make a spectacle of herself in front of other potential clients.

Let’s be clear: I have a loyalty to my clients. I also have a loyalty to my family. If you try to prevent me from earning a living to feed my family, my loyalty dries up like so much old paint.

There are a number of lessons from this event, which I’ll save for another post. But then, I had to fire a colleague.

At one time, this person and I traveled in relatively similar circles. I shared my book with her, and invited her into my community to share her wisdom. Over time, our paths diverged in the wilderness, but I still kept some contact with her and thought of her as a colleague I would refer business to.

Then, the unthinkable happened.

She “wrote” a post on her blog, and tweeted out the link. Because the title was a direct quote of something I say ALL the time, I thought it was worth checking out, and possibly sharing with my own audience. It was a great post. She had pulled much of the content straight out of my book – with a few additions (presumably of her own) to make it her own.

I was shocked. Firstly because I knew this thief. Secondly, because I really didn’t think that much of myself that someone would want to steal my stuff (that’s another post all unto itself).

There are stories like this all over the place. The first one that comes to mind is Jeff Slutsky’s story about Office Depot using his “six dollar haircut” story in an ad that ran last year. Slutsky, however, had a happier ending than I believe I will.

Not only did this “colleague” plagiarize my work, but when I commented on her blog with a “great post” kind of remark, it was deleted.

So not only did she steal my stuff, she KNEW she was stealing it and, frankly, didn’t seem to care.

At first, I tried to relax and ignore it. But this nagging feeling wouldn’t go away. Especially since this same person had publicly remarked at an earlier point in our business lives that she felt that at some point everything she ever learned became “hers” to teach as her own.

I consulted my amazingly grounded and insightful coach, @SarahRobinson, who indicated that while she was not surprised at the person in question, that it was mostly sapping my energy in a way that wouldn’t give me resolution.

So I fired my “colleague”. Putting more distance between us, and spending as little energy as possible on the situation.

Tip: Nobody “just knows” everything. We all learn from someone. Give credit where credit is due, folks.

Thinking I was finished with all the firing for a single week, I then had to fire a friend.

This person was fairly close to me, and sadly, known to be a bit out of control emotionally. Their behavior could get pretty outrageous at times, and if alcohol was involved, well, let’s just say only the sober people in the room would remember what happened.

This person is an incredibly smart, insightful, enjoyable person, with an enormous heart and fiercely loyal – until their emotional issues rear their ugly head(s). It gets so bad that they start to believe their own lies as truths. It’s been going on for years – longer than I’ve even known them.

Well, the lies finally caught up this week. And I couldn’t be there to help fix the problem. The problem was really beyond fixing. All enabling had to stop, and the truth had to be revealed.

I had entrusted this friend with a special task, and that task remains undone. The good news is that I wasn’t counting on them to complete the task, and had a back-up plan in place. The bad news is that I wasn’t counting on this friend to complete the task, and had a back-up plan in place.

So when word got around that they were playing around doing other things instead of focusing on the task they committed to, I fired the friend.

Well, a temporary lay-off, anyway.

We can be as well-meaning as we want to be, but when you make a commitment, in my mind, you stick to it. Come Hell or high water.

And lest you see this as an incredibly downer post, I want to assure you that I firmly believe that God is nudging me to create space to accommodate newer, better, more constructive relationships in my life and work.

I can already see it happening. With the awesome help of my coach (did you see her Relationships project?), and the internal journey I’m travelling, there are new friends on the horizon, new clients on the books, and better colleagues to forge ahead with (ending a sentence with a preposition, ACK!).

Bring. It. On.

Hope Is Not A Strategy (Part One)

Posted by LisaYoung in Big Ideas, Faith | 8 comments

It began with a blog post, which led me to Joan of Arc, then twitter, and finally another blog post that led me here.

Lest you think it’s circuitous thinking, give me the next couple of days to bring it into focus for you.

When my uber-helpful coach, Sarah Robinson posed the question “What is Generosity?“, she made the comment that too many people today are touting being generous as some kind of strategy.

I hit reply, almost without thinking and out came this:

IMHO, generosity can’t be a strategy, else it’s not true generosity – or maybe I’m confusing it with altruism. By definition, “Generosity is the habit of giving freely without expecting anything in return.” Any expectation negates the nature of generosity. Generosity is unconditional love in action. It’s not possible if it’s a strategy. Again, “strategy, a word of military origin, refers to a plan of action designed to achieve a particular goal.” A particular goal connotes an expected outcome. You can’t have expectation and no expectation in the same gesture.

You CAN have hope. For example, I’m doing this because I want to, and I HOPE that if you like it, you’ll tell people about it. No pressure, no expectation you’ll actually do anything other than receive the gift.

Hope is not a strategy either – at least from what people tell me, but I do a LOT of hoping, backed by action, and it seems to be working for me.

I also cracked that I should probably write a blog post about this, but didn’t feel I had the information to fully flesh out something of value to you.

A day or so later, while clearing off my in-box, I found a story card about Joan of Arc:

“Although she was not educated, Joan was very spiritual, and spent many hours in prayer and in helping others. When she was 13, she began to hear “voices” that carried messages from God. By the time she was 17, she was certain God wanted her to aid King Charles VII of France in his fight against the English. She successfully predicted the defeat in Orleans and was able to pick out the king, who was in disguise.”

Eventually, she was placed on trial, condemned to death as a heretic and burned at the stake.

Later that night, I popped onto twitter, and saw the tail end of a conversation between Sarah, and two of my pals, which triggered this thought in my brain:

Children are “distracted” from the world by their dreams. Adults are distracted from their dreams by the world.

I thought it was kind of poignant, but it felt like one of those timely things to say on twitter that will get retweeted a little and then die. Still, not really thinking much of it, I tweeted it and went to sleep.

Joan of Arc, dreams, visions, faith, hope, kids, all this stuff was swirling in my brain. Somehow it felt like I had been here before, staring at a puzzle with tow pieces still in my hands, not sure how they went together. They were all connected, but I wasn’t sure how.

Ever feel like that?

And then, Les McKeown, smarty pants that he is, made this post that made everything gel. In particular, it was this part of the post that pulled it all together:

“Many child prodigies in various disciplines – notably art, chess and mathematics – appear to be born with a highly attenuated ability to discern intricate patterns.”

Now, I’m not one to call myself a child prodigy. Perhaps that’s because I was fortunate enough to be part of a school program for academically talented/gifted kids from first grade through high school. A program, which sadly no longer exists in my community. I was in a room full of smarty pants kids that excelled in math, music, science, writing, art, etc.

I was not the smartest kid in ANY class, but I was “well rounded”, I guess you could say. I was in the top ten percent in most of my classes. I knew enough to “get by” in every subject, which in that group was getting an A/B average. Seriously, if you got less than a B+, you were usually looked at like an idiot. We all came to respect each other though, because invariably, where one of us was weak, there were others who were strong. And because we were all so socially awkward (think Mark Zuckerberg in “The Social Network”), we only had each other for the most part.

That’s another lesson for another day.

The point of even dredging up my school days was that the one thing I was better at than anyone else was finding patterns, common threads and other “connections” between seemingly unrelated stuff. I scored exceptionally high on pattern recognition tests, from alpha numeric to shape identification, even when I was young. I could even point out errors in the tests that the administrators didn’t catch.

And since that time, I’ve come to learn that these patterns, connections and correlations exist in nearly every facet of our lives.

We all know that “dumb jock” who ended up being a nobody. Or the cheerleader that got pregnant before graduation. Or the nerd who went on to greatness and was voted “most likely to succeed”. These stereotypes exists because they are patterns.

They are cycles that we can see coming – sometimes from miles away. Like the girl who was rejected from her high school drama club and later went on to be a successful actress. Or the awkward basketball player who went on to become one of the greatest players of all time – after he was rejected by a coach when he was in school.

There is very little in the world that isn’t cyclical in nature. I maintain that if we can’t see the pattern, it’s probably because we just haven’t experienced a long enough cycle to see the full pattern yet.

Think about your favorite stories. What elements of those stories mirror your own life? What elements of those stories are repeated over and over in your life? We can hope it’s the happy endings, but for most of us, we’re caught in the drama of the story.

Hope is not a strategy. Neither for your business nor your life. It’s not a way to get things done – to walk around with our fingers crossed, thinking good thoughts, and offering up wishful “prayers” that our story will have a happy ending.

No you’ve got to DO something. Doing is the strategy.

Many moons ago, I made a conscious decision to ask for what I want. Mom used to say that “the answer is always no if you don’t ask.”

Funny thing about moms, they’re often more right than you care to admit – especially when you’re a kid.

So I started asking. And people started saying yes. Some people say no, but the majority, the overwhelming majority of folks say yes.

I devised a strategy: Ask, with hope.

Ask for that thing, and in doing so, you’re taking action. Take action, and be hopeful about the outcome. Hope, backed by action – or perhaps, action, backed by hope – is a powerful strategy in the world.

It builds businesses. It restores lost friendships, it heals old wounds. It improves lives. It creates new experiences.

It works.

What have you been needing to ask for? Stop asking yourself why you’re not asking for it. ASK for it. Go for it.

Ask, with hope, and watch what happens.