Many people are surprised when I talk about the fact that some people can be authentically happy having a job because I’m such an advocate and champion for small business and entrepreneurship. That’s often because they miss the subtle but important point about small business and entrepreneurship being a vehicle for thriving on both a personal and social scale; vehicles, by their nature, are meant to get us somewhere – they’re not the ends in themselves.

So, let me be very clear about this: I’m pro-thriving more than I am pro-entrepreneurship or pro-business. Small business and entrepreneurship give many people the opportunity to build the environmental and personal arrangements that are conducive for their thriving – but, for people who have different values and priorities, having your own business can be misery-making. The vehicles of small business and entrepreneurship also provide us the opportunity to contribute to our society through taxes and employing others, but, again, an “opportunity” for one person is a problem for someone else.

And while “being an entrepreneur” is such an aspirational identity statement at the same time that it’s the socially-approved state in entrepreneurial circles, the truth of the matter is that it’s not for everyone nor should everyone get pressured into being one. I get rather frustrated when non-entrepreneurs are looked down on, as if their lack of entrepreneurial spunk or business-building drive makes them somehow inferior.

People aren’t less-than because they choose a life arrangement that works better for their values, (true) needs, and priorities. They’ve got far more figured out than those who stick to a path that isn’t working for them just because they can’t take the lessons-learned and sunk costs and use them to build a better life for themselves.

I’ve advised clients into putting their business on hold and getting a job, not because their business was failing, but because it seemed that their self-identified conditions for thriving were better met by being employed than by sticking with their business. I’ve advised clients to get better or different jobs for similar reasons. To automatically presume that the entrepreneurial road is right for everyone is a type of lazy thinking that doesn’t serve any of us very well.

Above anything else, I’m pro-thriving. My mission is to help people get to that end goal, regardless of the vehicle they take to get there.

It’s time for a check-in: is your current path either moving you toward thriving or maintaining the life that’s right for you? If so, focus on the things that are working for you, however they work for you. If not, what can you do to course-correct? Small steps can lead to big changes.

If you liked this post, you might like these, too:

1. 20 Inconvenient Business Truths
2. The Changes In Creative Work & Entrepreneurship
3. How To Get Out Of Your Business Comfort Zone

The free planners for February 2012 are now available! Get ‘em while they’re hot.

February is an interesting month because we reassess the resolutions and goals we set at the beginning of the year. It’s a lovely reality check – and now you get to figure out which projects you want to get done for February.

Imagine it’s March 1st. What key objectives or projects would you like to have done? I hope these planners help you move closer to that vision.

Throw your planning mojo into hyperdrive with the full set of 2012 Premium Planners. Head on over to the Premium Planners page to learn more and pick them up.

Monthly Action Planner

Basic idea: Projecting effectiveness further into the future requires a more holistic view of your objectives.
Use when: You’re doing your month planning and review – this planner can be used with either the Productivity Planners or the Freelancer Workweek.
For more information: The Monthly Action Planner

Download: Monthly Action Planner - February 2012 (567)

Productivity Heatmap:

Basic idea: We are more productive at some times rather than others.
Use when: You’re trying to figure out when you’re the most productive.
For more information: How Heatmapping Your Productivity Can Make You More Productive

Download: Blank Daily Productivity Heatmap (31372)

The Action Planner Series:

Basic Idea: Once you know when you work best, why not plan your weeks and days around that information? Do more work in less time by leveraging your natural rhythms.
Use when: You’re planning your day or week.
For more information: Read the Productivity Planners User Guide (11428)

Downloads:
Daily Action Planner - February 2012 (288)
Weekly Action Planner - February 2012 (273)

The Productivity Jumpstarter

Basic Idea: Sometimes we’re running around being busy but aren’t really being productive. This aid helps you stop running in circles and start making meaningful progress on your goals.
Use when: You have no idea what you should be doing and are tired of running in circles.

Download: Productivity Jumpstarter (v.2) (23476)

The Blog Post Planner and Calendar

Basic Idea: Brainstorming and planning your posts ahead of time may help you have a more streamlined, consistent, and insightful blog. Your mileage may vary, but it’s worth a shot!
Use when: You’re thinking about what you’re going to write.
For more information: The Blog Post Planner and Calendar – skip down to “How to Use These Planners” if you don’t need to be sold on why to use them.

Downloads:
Blog Post Planner - February 2012 (104)
Blog Post Calendar - February 2012 (84)
Blog Post Planner-Calendar Set - February 2012 (117)

The Freelancer Workweek

Basic Idea: Some of us work better to task than to time, and we need a planner that addresses how we work rather than making us fit how we work into it. This is a great one for freelancers and entrepreneurs.
Use when: You’re tired of time-based planners and want to get clarity on what needs to be done.
For more information: The Freelancer Workweek – skip down to “How to Use This Planner” if you don’t care about the design methodology.

Download: The Freelancer Workweek - February 2012 (152)

If you liked this post, you might like these, too:

1. The Free Planners for January 2012 Are Available
2. The Free Planners for February 2011 Are Available
3. The Free Planners for November 2011 Are Available

If you stand up and be counted, from time to time you may get yourself knocked down. But remember this: A man flattened by an opponent can get up again. A man flattened by conformity stays down for good. — Thomas J. Watson, Jr

What initially separates the leaders, changemakers, and heroes from everyone else is that they were presented a challenging situation and they stood up.

When everyone else followed the rules, stayed under cover, or took whatever crap they were dealt, they stood up and opted-out.

When everyone else got scared about how they might get pushed back down, they stood up and looked stagnation, injustice, and the status quo in the eye.

We are challenged day in and day out in ways big and small – when we don’t stand up in the small ways, we can’t stand up in the big ways. We get in the habit of sitting and too much sitting makes for weak cores and backbones.

We’re not made for sitting. We’re made for standing, walking, running, jumping, playing, and moving.

You don’t have to come out the gates with a minifesto, movement, charge against the system, or some epic journey. You don’t have to know everything or where it’s all headed. You don’t have to lie to yourself about the fear, uncertainty, and risk you’re facing.

You just have to stand up when it’s your time. Get up and take care of your people.

p.s. Yes, you. Yes, now. You’ll never be comfortably ready until it’s too late and you find yourself still sitting.

If you liked this post, you might like these, too:

1. How to Flourish: 17 Quotes On Living, Being, and Doing
2. Choosing Engaged and Meaningful over Comfort
3. Don’t Look A Gift Horse In The Mouth

Editor’s Note: This is a guest post by Nathalie Lussier.

When you’re a solopreneur, you have unlimited opportunities and unlimited tasks to do. How do you distinguish between potential projects, partnerships, and outreach opportunities? You might try to buckle down and attempt them all, but if you’ve ever tried to chow down on an entire batch of chocolate chip cookies in one sitting you realize quickly that the sugar crash is not worth it. Take it from a recovering cookie-a-holic, I know.

One of the most profound discoveries I made along my journey as an entrepreneur was seeing where my income came from. It’s easy to lump all of your sources of income into a category like “clients” or “products”, but unless you really sit down and look you won’t have a clear idea of what to spend your time on.

Here’s what I suggest you do, and I promise that by taking a look at where the money is coming from you’ll better be able to decide where to focus your time.

1. Write down by category where all your business income is coming from. That might be products, coaching, services, sponsorships, advertising, affiliate sales, depending on your online business model.
2. Now find out what percentage each of these categories contributes to your total for the year.
3. If you have a little more time, write down your expenses for each of these categories too. You might find that you’re hiring more staff to deliver on certain products or services, or that certain offerings aren’t as profitable as they appear.
4. Now it’s time to look at your average todo list. Do the things you focus on regularly reflect where the money is coming from?

After doing this exercise, I was able to see which parts of my business were the most profitable for me. It’s tempting to just focus on the projects that excite you the most, but this sobering exercise can help you see that although it’s good to focus on projects that make you happy, you need to pay attention to the ones that are the most profitable for your business too.

This exercise will also help you see if there are any places that you might be able to delegate some of your work out to others who can do a better job than you can. For instance, you might realize that the product sales part of your business is not bringing in as much revenue as you had hoped, but that you spend most of your time providing customer service for these products.

By hiring someone to manage the customer service end of things, it would free you up to provide more value to your coaching or consulting clients, for example. Or you might be able to spend more focused time creating marketing campaigns for these products, to help improve the number of sales you make (without worrying about how much customer service you’ll need to provide after the slew of sales).

I’m a huge fan of leading by example, and since I want to see you take action and do this exercise, I’m going to share my numbers with you. Every business will have different numbers, and they might fluctuate a lot depending on your business model. Here are mine at the time of this writing:

• 80% Web site design, and marketing launch consulting packages (I could break this down even further)
• 11% Affiliate products
• 9% Information product sales

I’d love to see your numbers in the comments below!

Nathalie Lussier is an online business triple threat who runs a web design and online marketing firm. She loves writing about the advantages of being a woman entrepreneur in today’s world, and she helps people get techy with their businesses every week through fun how-to videos. Follow her @NathLussier.

If you liked this post, you might like these, too:

1. The Four Essential Drives That Every Creative Needs
2. 5 Questions Business Owners Should Be Asking, Expanded
3. Are You Ready To Beat The Summer Slump?

One of our Lift Off alums recently asked how to deal with copycats and idea thieves. She’s been rocking it, getting great press, and things are taking off for her – and, as it always happens, copycats and idea thieves have started showing up and taking her work and phrases as their own.

One of the surest signs you’re doing something right is when people start swiping and imitating. A far worse fate is remaining in obscurity or creating ideas that aren’t worth stealing and spreading.

There are a lot of ways to deal with copycats and idea thieves, but there are three main strategies that come to mind:

1. Mark your territory by protecting your ideas, seeking trademarks, etc.

While it’s smart to develop relationships with trademark specialists and lawyers as your body of work grows, you have to be careful about how much time and resources you spend protecting your ideas. In the end, the copycats and idea thieves win, either because they’re going to dance around your marked territory or because they’ll simply run with the memetic momentum that you started but didn’t seize because you were busy protecting kernels of your idea rather than developing them.

2. Be more prolific

This second strategy is much better. The memetic momentum stays in your court and on your own terms and eventually you’ll win with a greater, more comprehensive body of work. The more prolific you are, the more them stealing your ideas is actually favoring you.

3. Go where the air is thinner

This is my favorite of the three. As you advance your body of work into deeper levels of depth and connection, the copycats simply won’t be able to coherently follow you; and, even when they can, they won’t because it’s too hard. Combine depth of work with your own unique voice and it’ll be impossible for people to successfully copy you. Your work will never fit them, any more than Jack Johnson can sound like John Mayer.

To switch metaphors, you’ll be able to canvass the treasures on the bottom of the sea that the surface divers simply can’t reach because they haven’t developed their lung capacity.

There’s only so much that protecting and withholding your ideas will do for you. The absolute worst thing to do is to keep your great work private once you hit the stage - you’ll only see people publishing ideas that are so close to your own and you’ll have nothing to say but “I shoulda / coulda wrote about that.”

To paraphrase Kevin Kelly’s contribution to End Malaria, you should thank the person that starts sharing and developing an idea as well or better than you, for they’ve just saved you the time of figuring out what you shouldn’t be developing. A significant part of the journey of thought leadership is figuring out which ideas you shouldn’t be developing.

Lastly, instead of pushing people out, make it easier to work with you than to work against you. Encourage collaboration and spreading; if your work is making a difference, get over yourself and get the medicine out there in the world. Copycats and thieves always take the route of least resistance; use that to your advantage.

Be public. Be prolific. Go where the air is thinner. Lead the pack rather than worrying about who’s nipping at your heels.

p.s. Watch how much you unintentionally borrow ideas, too. We consume so much online that it’s hard to tell where ideas are coming from. Model the behavior you want to see.

If you liked this post, you might like these, too:

1. Idea Nodes, Opportunity Chains, and Hypernetworking
2. Do You Have an Idea Garden?
3. How to Stifle A Good Idea

In the last part of this story, I shared the lead-up to the reset. In case you haven’t been following, the reset occurred because Angela (my wife) developed acute and debilitating anxiety, OCD, and depression as a result of a combination of medication and several years’ worth of unresolved grief and stress.

If you have been reading along, I’m aware that you may be emotionally overwhelmed by what’s been going on. No need to brace yourself for this part – it’s much lighter.

On September 30th, 2011, we had to put Angela on a strong cocktail of medications to get the anxiety overdrive to back off. On that same day, our business manager went on medical leave.

That’s because Angela was our business manager. Since November of 2010, she had been taken over more and more of the management functions of our company – coordinating with teammates, keeping projects on schedule, keeping us from overcommitting to projects, shepherding the schedule, working with vendors, handling insurance, and interacting with our clients, customers, and participants.

The reset would have been a lot easier on us had it just been that it was a personal reset, but it also meant that it was a business reset, too. She was managing so many critical functions that it wasn’t like it was just a decrease in capacity; it was a major blackout.

It’s easiest to explain my response as if our headquarters had come under enemy fire. I did what any field commander would do:

1. Neutralize the threat with all available combat power
2. Assess casualties and damage
3. Assess operational capabilities
4. Suspend all non-critical operations and allocate required resources to critical operations
5. Inform friendly and allied headquarters of attack and decreased operational capacity
6. Request additional forces and engineer support to repair damage

My course of action pretty much followed that template. Hey, training comes in handy.

We needed to pull Angela out of the business because a) her medications made her non-operation anyway and b) it was a source of anxiety for her. Our job was to focus on limiting external stressors during the reset so that she could focus just on her recovery.

I’ll note that this applied to the division of labor in our house, too. She couldn’t pay bills, check mail, make meals, do grocery shopping, run errands, or, well, a lot of things that I had to cover down on, too.

With Angela out of the management and coordination of our business, we immediately dropped down to a crawl. Let’s make this a bit less abstract: between the different members of Team PF, we cruised with around 100-110 ophours per week and might surge up to 160 or so. Our teammates are very good at what they do, so the mileage we cover in that amount of time is much more than you’d expect. We’d spent a good deal of 2011 getting our teamwork systems and processes in place and Angela was often the coordinative glue between the projects we ran.

And, of course, it wasn’t just that we lost that capability – I was also spending a lot of time being with and taking care of her. I was spending less time doing bizwork, too, which meant that we had both very little management and very little production. We went from 100 to 20 ophours all at once. (And here’s where Pam would remind me: that’s relative to the pace of our business – I was still writing, coaching, doing webinars, and connecting with people.)

Obviously, less capacity means you can’t do as much, so I had to assess which projects would go. As much as I didn’t want it to be the case, the reality was that I didn’t have the bandwidth to do much work on the book and keep things going, so that went to the wayside. The other project that really suffered was Lift Off, since Angela’s management and coordination of that project actually got it off the ground. (Note: the reset had no bearing on our choice to end Lift Off in 2012 – that decision was in the works before all of this came about.)

I also took stock of all the external projects we were involved with and saw that they just weren’t going to happen to the degree of execution that our colleagues were used to. We had already committed to them and I wasn’t going to back out completely and leave others hanging, but I also needed to let them know what was going on.

Practicing Being Vulnerable and Asking For Help

If something like this would’ve happened in the past, we would’ve just turtled up and not said anything; that was our natural response since we both are terrible at asking for help. However, one of my personal goals of 2010 was to learn to ask for and accept help, and, though I still have a long way to go with that, it kicked in. I knew it would be good for us all if I reached out to our trusted friends and colleagues.

Which led to one of the most unexpected and amazing events to happen from the reset. I sat down and thought about all the people in our business network who a) have met or interacted with Angela or we had a personal relationship with, b) would like to know, and c) that I trusted to tell. I reviewed the contacts in our CRM to make sure I wasn’t forgetting someone and was amazed at how many people I needed to write. (I inevitably forgot some people – sorry. I hate doing things like that because I hate forgetting people.)

The amount of love and support we got coming back from those people were just amazing. Many of them still don’t know how they helped us because they didn’t know they were helping. When times got hard – and there were plenty of hard times – I’d just think about some of them and what they’d say. It’s pretty hard to go wrong with Pam, Jonathan, Mark, Seth, Michael, Danielle, Tim, Michelle, Mollie, Jen, Andrea, Colleen, the other Tim, Molly, another Jen, Todd, yet another Tim, and others conversing and sharing counsel in your head. Special thanks to Pam, Mark, Jonathan, Michael, Johnny B. Truant, and Tim Brownson for actually being on the phone, too. (And, everyone else, sorry I didn’t call more often!)

Another surprising thing about all of this was how many people only met one or two of a, b, and c above. A reset like this also provides a momentous occasion for you to assess who you want to grow with and who’s no longer in your corner (and probably never was in the first place). Our social world got smaller but much richer.

I also had told our Lift Off alumns pretty quickly, too, since Angela is both a key part of the community and also kept things running smoothly. I knew they’d want to know and I also knew that they needed to know before something got messed up. We received yet another tide of love, support, and good will from them.

It took a lot of Resistance-fighting to tell my clients, though. The reality is that one of the things I provide for my clients is an emotional anchor and I was concerned that they’d be less likely to want to work with me. I was also concerned that I wouldn’t be able to be fully there.

All of this happened so quickly that I didn’t have much time for performance anxiety; I was on calls before I had decided what to tell them. I’ve had some of the best coaching sessions I’ve had in years during the reset. That concern quickly abated.

The concern about them not wanting to work with me was something that stuck with me but I let them know anyway. If my clients wouldn’t stick by me after all the times I’d been with them when times were hard, it was probably better to part ways there. I’m happy to report that I stayed as booked as I wanted through that period.

Are You Really Okay?

It’s often hard for me to talk about what I’m going through because I seem to process things differently. People who don’t really get me either think I’m too robotic or that I’m not really processing my feelings and what’s going on.

For years, I’ve practiced a mantra from the Dalai Lama’s The Art Of Happiness: “If the situation or problem is such that it can be remedied, then there is no need to worry about it. If there is no way out, no solution, or no possibility of resolution, then there is also no need to worry about it.” Of course, my more shorthand way of saying it is “Find the solution and work it or let it go if there’s not a solution.”

We had a solution in place for Angela and we just needed some time and to work the solution. I had already factored in that I’d need additional time and patience with myself so I could make sure I was getting the self-care I needed, too. I intentionally scaled back our operations and plans to be something that wouldn’t require a lot of management or attention from me since it wouldn’t happen.

Between just sitting with and talking to Angela, being with myself, getting some exercise (not nearly enough, though), helping other people, and celebrating client and Lift Off wins, I had plenty of time to process, reframe, pivot, celebrate, and so on. To explain my process for doing so would be a book itself, but I was mostly okay.

I say mostly because I still spent plenty of time frustrated, anxious, melancholy, exasperated, overwhelmed, and everything else you might expect, but I approached it the same way I imagine a stablehand cleans a horse’s stall. Grab a shovel and bucket and get to work without worrying about how bad it smells and whether you’ll end up doing it again tomorrow – it does, you will, and it doesn’t affect the task at hand.

And there were plenty of times where I just sat on the couch, went for a walk around the block to get some air, or laid under my desk with the door shut because it felt like the only safe space in the world where I could collect myself. Ten minutes later, I’d be on a call, writing, answering email, seeing how Angela was doing, or eating lunch.

There was a lot of pressure for me to call and talk to people, but I didn’t know what to “talk” about, especially given how intense the real story could be. Smaller, safer parts of the story were too emotionally intense for a lot of people and it was awkward for me not to have the behavior people were expecting me to have.

The best thing for me was to be mindful, work the solution, practice self-care, and reach out when I could. And perhaps switch environments…

Time to Get Out Of The Office

Our company has been growing into new markets for a while now and I’ve known that we’d reach a point in which it would make sense for us to get our own commercial space to do business in. As you might imagine, that’s a big leap – not only does it add to your overheads in a way that can be hard to swallow, but it also adds commutes, staff, “open hours,” and a whole slew of other considerations that many entrepreneurs don’t feel like messing with. However, that’s where we’re going; why we’re going there will be revealed in time.

It was also true that, during the more intense parts of the reset, I was operating in 45-minute attention cycles. I’d get about 45 minutes before I needed to check on Angela, answer a call from her parents, make or eat food, run to a doctor, chase a sick cat down, or any number of other things like that. I simply wasn’t working effectively and it mostly boiled down to an environment that was both distraction- and anxiety-heavy.

If I was going to keep the ship from sinking, I was going to have to dig emotionally deep and harness that energy effectively. I couldn’t dig deep at home with everything going on and I’ve never been able to do well out of coffee shops. I had to find a place to reestablish our command center and time was of the essence.

After a few weeks of searching, I settled on an executive office in downtown Portland. It’s not our endgame – it’s the launchpad I speak of in “No vs. Not Now.” It wasn’t the right time for us to move on our later plan; it’s something I couldn’t do by myself and, at that time, myself is all I had that I could rely on. Time flies, though, and we’ll be there soon enough.

I’ll be recording from that office in the future and I intentionally didn’t record before I shared all of this because I couldn’t not tell the story behind it. It’s important to understand the full context of the story, though: we didn’t get the office just because of the reset, although the reset definitely accelerated the need to get an external office.

Is This Worth Fighting For?

Since I had a lot of sitting and thinking time during the reset period, I started thinking about how I was showing up in the world. Much of it came as a reaction of my own guilt, regret, and frustration with myself for having things get so out of hand right under my nose, but it also came from the fact that we were in a tough time in our business.

We’re going through the Stage 3 growing pains and reinvested a lot of our revenue back into the business rather than ourselves. In less abstract language, we’d been paying ourselves less and it was getting tight. Too tight.

And then the reset happened. Too tight became “oh crap, we’re running out of fuel and might not make it.”

For 2011, I did what expert planners loathe to do but sometimes is required to get a big project done: we had a complex plan that depended on one thing to make it all work. That one thing was the book – it was the linchpin and springboard for so many other plans, and, without it, the house of cards started coming down.

Yes, we accomplished some amazing things last year, but the book is still in limbo, which means there’s a lot still in limbo. By my estimates, we’re now (at least) two quarters “behind,” and that makes a big difference when it comes to the revenue opportunities that are pending the book.

In hindsight, there were other operational alternatives to the book-or-bust plan and that’s yet another plane we’ve been fixing while flying it. But we’re here nonetheless.

What does this have to do with how I want to show up in the world? Easy, really. Life and resources are too short to be screwing around.

I took stock of all the things I wanted and needed to say, everything I intentionally wasn’t saying so as to keep the peace, and, importantly, how much I was writing and talking to the wrong people because I started placing more weight on pageviews and popularity than rigor and insight. That’s not a message I want to advance, and it’s for damn sure something I don’t want to model.

Would I fight for all of that? Nope.

And here’s the rub: during the reset, every time I shared something that continued that inertia, I had fought for it, even if unintentionally. Everything you do that’s not worth doing comes at the cost of what is worth doing, after all.

I ended up not-fighting with Janet about what the book is about; it’s now a better project that represents the way I want to show up in the world – it may not be a best-seller, but it’ll be a best-server for those who it’s for. And if I’m going to spend a few years on a project, let’s make damn sure it’s one that I want to wake up and work on.

When people asked me to talk just about productivity tips, I said no. If that’s just what they wanted, there are other people who’d love to do it. If they can get people to show up, I’m going to show up with the best of what I’ve got, which isn’t “7 Steps to A Cleaner Inbox.” We can be better stewards of people’s time and resources than that.

I’ve been lazier as a creative and leader than I could have been. That’s not worth fighting for – I’d be better off getting a nice cushy job if that’s how I wanted to show up in the world. The last time I checked, I gave up some of those nice, cushy jobs.

It’s time to be a better leader, creative, and changemaker – life and resources are too short to be screwing around.

Putting It Back Together In A Better Way

I’ve often compared the reset to Humpty Dumpty falling off the wall. No matter what you do, you can’t put something like this back together again the same way it was before.

It does, however, present a choice: since you have to put it back together, how will you put it back together?

While I’d never wish this on someone else, it seems that we need resets every once in a while.

We accept ways of living that aren’t in congruence with ourselves and our needs.

We accept people into our lives who may not need to be there and overlook the ones who should be there.

We accumulate activities, expectations, and a whole slew of other stuff into our businesses that don’t need to be there and forget our principles and vision.

We don’t take timeouts and take time to make sure we’re still living from the inside out rather than living from the outside in.

We lose ourselves, day by day, unless we recreate ourselves, day by day.

I’ve said all of these things before and I’ll continue to say them, not because I like them or because they make for a compelling marketing message, but because they’re true and require constant practice and vigilence.

We’ve decided to put our lives and business back together in a better way and we’re well into that journey. We’ve got a ways to go, but Angela and I are constantly surprised by how we have to put ourselves “back there” in October and November; it’s such a different world, though we’re still dealing with the second- and third-order effects of something that cataclysmic.

The darkness has passed and we’re no longer in reset. We’re in reintegration. And now you’re (mostly) caught up.

If you liked this post, you might like these, too:

1. The Lead-up to the Reset
2. 3 Questions To Ask Before You Hit Reset On Your Business
3. Hitting The Reset Button on Digital Clutter

Yesterday I shared our experience with having to reset Angela and coming out of a different kind of darkness. This continues that story and shows more clearly how we got there.

We tend to have a myopic view of our lives, only focusing on the few months before the present we’re in and a few months in the future. The lead-up to the reset actually started in 2009. To make this make sense, I’ll give a brief chronological playthrough.

In November 2009, Angela was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis.

In January 2010, she decided that the academic path wasn’t for her and started winding that down.

In March 2010, we put our house in Nebraska up for sale. We were selling it without a realtor, and, if that wasn’t bad enough, we didn’t quite know where we were moving yet.

We sold our house in April 2010, still not knowing where we were going to live.

In May 2010, we visited Portland and decided to move here. We put an offer on the house we currently live in from the business center at the Portland Airport and hurried to get on our plane before it took off. We didn’t know what happened until we hit the ground.

In mid-May 2010, the Oregon Trail Chronicle began. We had to stay in a corporate apartment in Lincoln, Nebraska because the home-buying process in Oregon is anything but quick. Our entire home except for what could fit in our SUV was packed in containers and shipped to Portland. It wouldn’t have been so bad except we had our 3 cats and their horde of accessories, too, as well as the bare essentials we needed to keep our business running.

While in that corporate apartment, one of our cats blacked out from the tranquilizers we gave them in preparation for our journey. We (wisely) tested the tranqs before we hit the road because we wanted to make sure they’d be okay while we were still where their vet was and our smallest cat didn’t take it so well. I was on an instructional call with Michael Bungay-Stanier when Angela frantically drove our unconscious cat to the vet. Luckily, that apartment was about a 1/2 mile from the vet. The vet was able to revive him and everything was okay, but we figured out that we’d have to travel cross-country in an SUV with three fully awake cats.

After spending four or five days on the road, 10 days in a Holiday Inn, and nearly two weeks in our real estate agent’s house, we finally moved into our brand-new home. We bought a new home in an older neighborhood figuring that we’d have fewer problems with our house. That seems to be a reasonable assumption, but houses always come with problems and things to fix. Those fixes, upgrades, and costs of replacing furniture chewed through our savings pretty quickly.

Losing A Few Loved Ones

After a few months of really good times and experiences, Angela’s dad and uncle noticed their mother acting strange. About two weeks after they noticed that, Angela’s grandmother died unexpectedly in the middle of the night. Angela was very close to her grandmother and there was a lot of pressure on Angela to determine what the family should do prior to her grandmother’s death; Angela accepted a lot of responsibility for her grandmother’s untimely (?) death. Her grandmother died the weekend before Thanksgiving.

Her parents were scheduled to come to our house for Thanksgiving, and all of a sudden, we found ourselves quickly packing up and heading to Arkansas to help with the funeral and everything else that comes up when somebody dies unexpectedly. A lot of the coordination for her grandmother’s funeral ended up in Angela’s lap and she spent about two weeks in Arkansas; I needed to return home earlier to tend to the house and business.

In February, Angela’s other grandmother got sick and needed to be admitted to the hospital. They released her back to home healthcare, but she was no longer able to be the homemaking grandmother-wife that she’d always been and who Angela had always known.

In the meantime, our oldest cat – probably the coolest of them, but definitely the sickliest of them – had to be in and out of a lampshade collar due to an infected cyst on her stomach that she kept licking. We eventually had to have it removed and she then spent a few months in and out of the collar while the sore healed, reopened, healed, and so on. Nabbing, wrangling, and monitoring a cat in a lampshade collar is a stressful endeavor in case you’ve never done it.

In April, the deceased grandmother’s husband died. Though they weren’t related, he was like a kin grandfather to her.

Dying On An Alaska Highway

Angela began taking an experimental medication for her UC in June since the medicines she had been taking weren’t keeping the UC under control. The week before we left for a vacation to Alaska, she was directed to increase the dosage of that medication.

While at a musk ox farm in Alaska in July, she had a violent vomiting fit and nearly passed out. There are surprisingly few hospitals in Alaska, so we ended up in Wasilla at an urgent care facility. We had to wait overnight on labs, not knowing what was going on, all the while Angela was slowly getting worse.

The next morning, we packed up and started heading towards Anchorage before we even got the call from the doctor. We learned enroute that she had developed an extreme case of pancreatitis – it was a rare side effect of the experimental medication. As I was driving her from Wasilla to Alaska, Angela could feel her body shutting down; she was dying by the minute. (The calm, composed, ready-to-act posture was the most appropriate for me to take to get her there safely without crashing or exciting her into shock; while I may have been cool on the surface and action-level, my soul was being torn to pieces as I was gripped with the possibility that I might be saying goodbye to her in a freaking rental car on the side of a road in Alaska.)

We got her to Anchorage in time. She was in extreme pain and approaching shock, and we learned as her throat was closing up that she’s allergic to morphine. (What a day!) They were able to calm the allergic reaction and stabilize her pancreatitis. After a few more hours of monitoring, they released us. Though we both wanted to go home, we stayed at an Alaska resort for a couple days following that since we wanted to make sure that everything was okay – we didn’t want to be on a plane flight while she was recovering.

Needless to say, the Alaskan vacation was anything but restful. A few weeks later, we were in New York for a business trip like nothing had happened. It was apparent that we needed to slow down, so we decided to go to Cancun for 10 days. We left a month later and a few weeks after Lift Off 4.

Everything apparently caught up with her in September. It always catches up some time, but the prolonged prednisone treatment that I mentioned at the outset intensified everything.

If It Looks Like PTSD …

I’m not a trained psychologist, so I’m in no position to make clinical diagnoses. However, I have been trained to see the signs of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)- as a military leader deployed during a time of war, it’s part of your job to continually monitor the morale and mental health of your troops. We do better nowadays at that, but we’re still not where we need to be.

Coincidentally, one of the interesting findings of Angela’s dissertation research into the coping strategies and well-being of the spouses of deployed reservists is how many of them had the telltale signs of PTSD, too. It was expected that the soldiers themselves would exhibit the signs, but many people overlooked the spouses because the assumption is that it’s something soldiers, police officers, firefighters, and other similarly occupied people get.

Yet another misconception. Surviving a nasty car crash, making it out of your house alive after a fire, surviving an emergency plane landing, being raped, or getting attacked by animals, to name a few, are also traumatic events that can affect one and possibly trigger PTSD.

While in Alaska, Angela experienced her body shutting down with the acute pancreatitis she developed from the experimental medication she was taking. She had trouble processing it, and I later found out that she’d been thinking about it and reexperiencing it more than she talked about. She was also hypervigilant, hyperanxious, unable to sleep, and her UC flareup was intensifying – remember, UC flareups can be caused by extreme stress.

The trouble is that some of those symptoms are consistent with taking prednisone. Had she not been taking prednisone, it would have been a much more obvious explanation. As it was, though, I missed it.

It’s also impossible to tell how much the prednisone accelerated the development of the PTSD, as well. PTSD is a troubling condition precisely because how we respond to stress is so unique; people can be in the same trauma-inducing incident and have two completely different responses. As an aside, that’s sometimes why it’s hard for me to talk about my experience – I’ve yet to develop many of the emotional and psychological complications that people would expect I’d have. (That’ll come up in the next part, too.)

When You Can’t Stop Before You Have To

I’ve previously written a piece called “Stop Before You Have To” that addresses the need for us to take time out before we reach a position where we have to stop. Writing pieces like that have a tendency to both remind you and also bite you in the ass when the truth of it comes home to roost.

A few years back, I had decided that I didn’t want to grow our company the way that I’d seen others do it. When I looked past the smoke, mirrors, and fairy dust, I saw a lot of shattered lives and people suffering, at the same time that I saw a lot of rationalization about what was happening. Running non-stop has a cost, even for those who are wired for it.

Yet, when you look over the events of late 2010 and 2011, we had discarded three careers, uprooted our home without knowing where we’d land, lived on the road, co-led 4 Lift Off Retreats, launched several products, maintained a full coaching roster, started writing a book, gave talks across the nation, and, well, the list goes on. Strangely, a lot of that was with me constantly putting the brakes on things – it’d be much different if we did it without intentionally considering pacing.

Nonetheless, the events that Angela experienced were far out of our control. What’s even more disappointing is that her near-death experience happened while we were on what was supposed to be a vacation.

So, needless to say, working through the reset wasn’t just a matter of getting medicines out of Angela’s system; it was instead the process of working through the grief that results with learning that you have an uncurable, lifechanging chronic disease, grieving two lost loved ones, coming to grips with nearly dying, and a years worth of a life running at full speed. It was clear it was going to be awhile.

Which led into a challenging situation for me, as well: how was I supposed to manage a fast-growing business, a family crisis, and myself simultaneously? That’s what I’ll talk about tomorrow in From Reset to Reintegration.

If you liked this post, you might like these, too:

1. From Reset to Reintegration
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3. Out of a Different Kind of Darkness

I’m going to share a hard story with you about what’s been going on behind the scenes. It’s a story of struggle, perservance, and slow triumph and it’s still in-progress. I’m breaking it into parts both for readability and so that I’ll start sharing it sooner rather than later.

On September 30th, 2011, our world got turned upside down. Angela (my wife) was on emotional overdrive and we couldn’t turn it off.

Of course, you’re probably wondering how we got there. In November of 2009, Angela was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis. Ulcerative colitis is a medical condition similar to the more known Crohn’s disease; the lower colon becomes inflammed and develops ulcers. It causes a lot of digestive abnormalities, which is bad enough, but given the taboo nature of the such things for women, it’s even worse.

People with ulcerative colitis (UC) have flare-ups as a reaction to food and/or stress. A UC flare-up disrupts digestive processes even more; whatever is eaten immediately comes out, unprocessed. One of the medical responses to flare-ups that don’t clear up on their own is to take prednisone. Prednisone is a steriod with a whole slew of side effects, one of which is anxiety and nervousness.

Throughout last September, Angela was dealing with a particularly bad flare-up and was on a long, high dose of prednisone and it triggered acute, debilitating anxiety, OCD, and depression. Relatively simple tasks like deciding what to eat for lunch paralyzed her, and then knowing she was paralyzed got her either obsessed with what was wrong with her or depressed that she was paralyzed. It didn’t help that she was getting 2-3 hours of sleep a night, at best.

It was hard to see my normally rock-steady wife lose herself. She’s the glue that holds so many things together, but she reached a point to where she couldn’t hold herself together. The day we released 2012′s planners, I came downstairs and found her crying and frustrated because she’d spent the last 7-10 minutes unable to decide between a turkey and ham sandwich.

After that, I called and got her into her doctor as soon as possible. I’d never seen her like this and it was getting worse – we needed help.

Time to Reset

The trouble with talking about mental illness is that it has such a stigma, despite how prevalent it is. Most of the words we have are so culturally and emotionally-charged that you end up either having to calm people down when you tell them about it or explain why you’re not freaked the hell out about what’s going on.

I say this because I’ve been very careful with the way I’ve talked and thought about everything that’s been going. “Breakdown” or “lost her mind” would be the words that most people would use to describe what happened to Angela, but neither resonate with us.

Angela needed to reset. We couldn’t turn the emotional and psychological maelstrom off, but what was going on wasn’t her.

She was prescribed some drugs I won’t mention by name lest we all get spammed to death. It was a tricky pharmeceutical dance: we had to take one medicine to fight the extreme anxiety, others in conjunction with that to get her to sleep, and, later, others to stabilize her moods and fight the background anxiety.

And we pulled her off the prednisone as quickly as we could. While consulting with her G/I doctor, it was determined that a) prednisone was off the list of drugs she could take and b) she may have been misprescribed it in the first place. Some of the symptoms of UC are the same as IBS, but since she was diagnosed with UC, it was presumed to be the culprit. It turns out that over-the-counter Immodium AD and de-stressing works better for her. (Doh!)

I spent a lot of time in October in and out of doctor’s offices and taking care of Angela. It wasn’t safe for her to drive, she needed someone to be with her, and she needed to rest. I didn’t have to be with her to keep her from intentionally hurting herself, but, rather, if I wasn’t around, she’d start trying to work on something. I’d run upstairs to get something, field a call from her parents who were understandably concerned and wanted to know what’s going on, and come downstairs to find her raking leaves or cleaning the kitchen.

Except she really wasn’t raking the leaves or cleaning the kitchen. She was overwhelmed by all the micro-decisions that come up when you do mundane tasks like that. Those micro-decisions were straws being placed on the camel’s back, which is exactly the opposite of what we were trying to do.

Anxiety, Depression, Obsessions, and … Suicide

The reset period was especially hard because it was akin to slamming on your brakes on the interstate. Angela has always been really active in one thing or the other and being pulled out of everything was hard. It’s hard for most of us to sit still anyway, but it’s especially hard when you’re battling anxiety and obsessive thoughts.

The way I came to understand the anxiety and obsessive thoughts were like she had a psychic claw dangling from her head. The claw grabbed whatever she placed her attention on and would not let go. One of our cats was sick with some kind of weird sneeze and Angela would worry about that for a few hours until the mail came and she saw the outside of a bill. The psychic claw would grab onto the bill and she’d worry about that for a few hours until she saw something in the kitchen that needed cleaning. The claw would then grab that. Round and round we went.

While I didn’t have to worry about Angela intentionally hurting herself, she was having reoccuring thoughts and obsessions about how much better off we’d all be if she were no longer around and we didn’t have to take care of her. At other times, she’d be thinking about ways she would kill herself if she were going to kill herself. Conversations like these are something I’d never wish someone to go through, either as the person having the thoughts or as the person hearing their beloved suggesting that they’d be better off with their partner dead. (Well after the more intense parts of the reset, Pam sent me the link to Out of the Darkness, a piece on the New York Times that struck really close to home – the name of this part is a tip o’ the hat to that piece.)

I participated in some of her earlier therapy sessions since I had to take her there, she felt more comfortable when I was with her, and because I wanted to make sure that Angela shared her suicidal ideations with her psychologist. Her psychologist let us know that what I just described was normal for what she was going through. The object of her obsessive thoughts didn’t matter and it didn’t even matter whether they were “real” issues, and, unfortunately, trying to rationalize them away only fed the obsessions. It was hard for us both not to try to rationalize and reason through things, given who we are. Suicidal ideations are also common for people struggling with depression, too, but it was good that we were talking about them and addressing them head on.

That rationality thing played out in another challenging and unexpected way since Angela has a PhD in Sociology with a specialization in family and mental health. She knew exactly what was going on with her and how she’d be expected to feel, but that actually made it worse. It’s like being able to see yourself falling but not being able to do anything about it at the same time that you feel everything that comes with falling.

Putting the Pieces Together While Waiting

A lot of October and early November was an intense waiting game; the meds had to kick in and get things stabilized, but an anxiety-obsession-depression spiral would throw us off for at least a day and sometimes several days. The mornings were hard because we’d have to work through so many counter-productive patterns and the nights were hard because we never knew how the next day would be. “One day at a time” is easy to say but incredibly hard to practice sometimes, especially when the days are so long.

Through all of this waiting, I started putting so many puzzle-pieces together in a way that made them all make sense. This was a long time a-coming – you’ll see how in the next part.

In case you’re curious, yes, Angela and I are both ready to share this publicly. We don’t want to perpetuate the trend of people not being able to talk about ulcerative colitis and mental illness, and, as a business leader, I don’t want to perpetuate the myth that entrepreneurship and small busieness is all unicorns and kittens. Sometimes it sucks AND some of the best lessons come from working through challenges.

Continue the story by reading “The Lead-Up to The Reset.”

If you liked this post, you might like these, too:

1. A Breakthrough For This Vet On Veteran’s Day
2. What I’m Here To Do
3. The Lead-up to the Reset

One of these guys is Leo and the other is Charlie. You get to figure out which is which. This was completely uncoordinated.

A few weeks back, I was writing a post
in reply to Leo’s discussion of No Goals.
I found myself referencing many versions of the Tao Te Ching
to show missing pieces that weren’t in his discussion.

As I reflected on the essential tenets of the Tao,
I saw that what little I had to say needed proving.
Leo’s way works for him, but it does not work for many,
although many can learn from what works for him.

Besides, though phronesis is captured in books
It lives and is cultivated in the world.
Words point to the truth,
Living instantiates it.

There is nothing wrong with plans or goals.
Sages have always had both and always will.
We find trouble when we’re attached to specific outcomes
and attempt to dominate the world’s unfolding.

Tread carefully when walking across thin ice.
Walk confidently when on firm ground.
Breathe in clean air and bask in the warm sun.
Seek shelter and stay dry when it rains.

Each situation has its own appropriate response.
To say one for all or all for one
Is like telling babies to eat hard food
And adults to stick to applesauce.

***
Since it may be lost in expression, I want to be clear that I respect, appreciate, and support Leo and his great work. This is more of a “Yes AND” rather than an “either/or” response.

If you liked this post, you might like these, too:

1. Are Your Goals S.M.A.R.T.?
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3. Don’t We Get to Choose What Words Mean?

[I was originally just going to post the pictures, but I thought I'd share them in a video with me talking about them. I'm keeping the photos up since video isn't everyone's thing.]

Wolf Blitzer and CNN came through and I was assigned to escort them.

I saw Wolf Blitzer reminiscing on the Iraq War last week. The Iraq war officially ended on December 15th, 2011. As he was talking about his experience with Iraq, I was thinking about my experience with him in Iraq. Don’t worry, I’m sure he doesn’t remember me – I was just assigned to escort him around our little base and answer any questions he had.

My mobile command desk

Here recently I’ve been thinking a lot about my office since we’re in a bit of a transition. When I get frustrated, I always reflect on the fact that at least I’m not living in an 8-man tent in the desert with sand in everything and constant power outages. (Notice the 2003 MacBook, iSight, and iPod.)

I’ve started to talk more about my experience “over there” since last year – and, in a Lost Rifle on A Dark Night, I shared one of my convoy experiences.. I took the following pictures from the gun turret of a HUMVEE – it was a smaller convoy, but you get the idea. Note: this is the desert, so the convoy is longer than it looks in this picture.

Looking down the convoy

Notice the people on the side of the road? Not cool.

The people on the side of the road in the last picture were a constant source of anxiety. We were there during the time in which the civilians on the side of the road would occasionally leave explosive surprises or be in alliance with the insurgents, who also would leave explosive surprises for us. Other times, they were just kids and women, but you never could tell.

I'm not fat! I'm armored-up. (Okay, and a little heavy.)

By the time you count all the armor, weapons, ammo, radio equipment, and assort what-nots in pockets, it was easy to be carrying 45 – 70 pounds of stuff on you. I swear, there’s something about those army glasses that gave you Superman vision. Unfortunately, they’re only cool in Portland, where I didn’t live at the time but currently do.

On the one hand, desert. On the other, opulence.

Sitting in the dictator's chair.

These were pictures taken in one of Saddam’s palaces. I can’t disclose why I was there, but I decided to snag some pictures.

I always remember how pretty the sunrises and sunsets were in the desert.

I have so many memories of my deployment. It was both the hardest and one of the best times of my life and I’m still unraveling and implementing the lessons I learned through that crucible period. Amidst the fighting, the suffering, and the loneliness, there was brotherhood, mission, and happiness. The sunrises and sunsets were both spectacular and monumental; it was another day you got to live, another day you made it, and one day closer to home.

That’s something everyone couldn’t say. It was true then, and it’s true now.

Thank you to those served, in whatever capacity. And, for everyone else, life is precious – live it well.

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1. Remembering the Fallen on Memorial Day
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