The Deal That Almost Broke Me

Last October, I was approached to sell Sparkplugging by a different company. Thinking this was a perfect match and that everything would go according to ‘plan’, I started getting ready to let Sparkplugging go. I began a new project, said my emotional farewells, and then the economy slammed me in the face and the deal fell through. I was devastated at the time – and found myself in a difficult position. My fledgling new kids network was taking off better than I had expected, I was burnt out on business writing, and suddenly I was stuck with a business that I had just spent 4 months saying goodbye to.

For a while, I didn’t really know what to do. So I hired Kelly McCausey to be the Senior Editor of Sparkplugging to buy me some time to determine what was the next best move. In the meantime, my kids network started not only replacing, but surpassing my Sparkplugging income, and I was even less interested in going back to something that was so much more work for so much less ROI.

Letting Go

I ended up turning to my weekly mastermind group of friends for advice – and lo and behold, one of them was interested in taking Sparkplugging off of my hands. My old co-author on Sparkplug CEO – Dawud Miracle (and a business partner) soon purchased the site in a deal that was 20 times better than the one that fell through 7 months earlier. Then he lays the news on me that they have hired Easton Ellsworth to be Editor, because Kelly wanted to move onto other projects.

And then I cried.

I cried because I was so happy that my “baby” was now in the hands of dear friends. I cried because I had worked for this 3 and a half years, and finally saw the fruits of my labors. I cried because I was closing a chapter in my life that was both blissful and painful. And I cried because somehow I doubted the universe had my best interests at heart when I lost the first deal, only to find that the universe totally carried me through to exactly where I needed to be.

What I’m Doing Now

What I find probably most interesting of all is that Woo! Jr. is everything that Sparkplugging wasn’t – and everything that I wanted it to be. Sparkplugging was best monetized through consulting and product sales – two avenues I tried and absolutely hated. I wanted a blog network monetized by affiliate revenue and advertising, and I didn’t want to have to hire writers anymore. My 7 Woo! Jr. sites just surpassed 1 million page views this October, and seriously – my life couldn’t be more awesome. I don’t have to travel and speak anymore to promote myself, I get to make crafts with my kids, and I’ve finally replaced my old income from the corporate world.

2009 was a rough year in many ways – I had some health issues, experienced a difficult betrayal of a friend, and I thought I might have to shut Sparkplugging down at one point. If I had to choose between it and my health, well, the blog was going to go. But I swear that God works in mysterious ways, because all the things that I thought went wrong this year were actually the very things that set me on the right path to where I am right now.

You know that saying – what comes around, goes around? Well for many years I sent around great karma, waiting for it to come back. And waiting. And waiting. And now it’s here, and I honestly have a difficult time putting my gratitude into words. I’m grateful to all of the writers I’ve worked with along the way, grateful to my husband for supporting me when I wasn’t making a cent, grateful to my kids for putting up with all the long work hours, grateful to my friends who helped my website grow, and grateful to my God for bringing me here.

Yeah.

“Nielsen Online’s Power Mom 50 is a collection of leading voices in the mom blogosphere based on a blend of blog posts and comments, and inbound/outbound captured via Nielsen BuzzMetrics, as well as Twitter followers and other metrics.

The complete list is available here.”

-Jessica Hogue, Research Director, Nielsen Online
Power Moms Consumer Insight Report

Since I’ve been laying low lately as I launch my second blog network and take some much needed rest, I was especially pleased to know people haven’t forgotten about me.

So what does it mean to be on The List? The following 16 “Power Pack” moms are considered “…Momfluentials that pack too much of a punch to be categorized. These women create powerful mom networks; speak around the world on the dynamic digital world of mom; and have legions hanging on their every word -via TV, magazines, podcast, blog or tweet.”

• Heather Armstrong http://www.dooce.com
• Maria Bailey http://www.bluesuit.com
• Lisa Belkin http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/
• Alice Bradley http://www.finslippy.com
• Daphne Brogdon http://coolmom.com
• Amy Clark http://www.momadvice.com
• Stacy Debroff http://www.momcentral.com
• Asha Dornfest http://www.parenthacks.com
• Jessica Gottlieb http://www.jessicagottlieb.com
• Christine Koh http://www.bostonmamas.com
• Jenny Lawson http://www.thebloggess.com
• Dana Loesch http://www.themamalogues.com
• Audrey McClelland http://www.momgenerations.com
• Wendy Piersall http://www.wendypiersall.com
• Mindy Roberts http://themommyblog.net
• Jessica Smith http://www.jessicaknows.com

What an honor to be included with some of my favorite women in social media! I do want to say that I think Barbara Jones, Allison Worthington, Isabel Kallman, Michelle Lamar, Janice Croze & Susan Carraretto, Kristin Chase & Liz Gumbinner and Maggie Mason need to get squeezed onto this list somewhere (I say for fear of forgetting another awesome mom myself!).

Kmart’s specific social media goals they wanted to achieve:

Awareness

• Raise overall awareness of Kmart within the social media space.

Brand Perception

• Increase Kmart’s brand perception through affinity with leading online influencers.

Education

• Educate bloggers about Kmart’s various offerings during the 2008 holiday season.

Traffic

• Create social media content designed to drive readers directly to Kmart.com and encourage offline store visits.

Insight

• Gain insight into the bloggers opinions and experience with the Kmart shopping experience.

IZEA’s Brilliant Multi-Platform Social Media Marketing Campaign

IZEA identified 6 influential bloggers who also had a strong following on Twitter to participate in the campaign, Chris Brogan, Loren Feldman, Julia Roy, Jeremy Schoemaker, Michelle Madhok, and myself. Each received a $500 Kmart gift card, as well as an additional $500 gift card to give away in a contest to one of their blog readers. Each blogger was required to write a blog post about their shopping experience, disclose the sponsored nature of the post, and host the individual contests on their blogs.

To encourage Kmart brand awareness and a viral spread of this campaign, IZEA structured the contest promotion to reward individuals for their participation in the contest:

• Individuals could enter the contest by leaving a comment on the sponsored blog posts. To boost product awareness, entrants were instructed to go to the Kmart.com website and do a ‘virtual’ shopping spree. They then had to list what they would purchase if they won the $500 Kmart gift card.
• Individuals could also enter the contest a second time by sending out a specified “Tweet” on Twitter, which ensured that news of the contest appeared in the timelines of over 2.5 million direct followers on Twitter.
• SocialSpark community bloggers were then given the paid opportunity to run ads on their blogs promoting any one of the six primary bloggers in the campaign. These appeared at the bottom of the page in an expandable ad unit sending visitors directly to the premium blogger contest posts.

Campaign Results and Analysis

Once the campaign was launched, people entered the gift card contest in droves. In addition to Twitter, IZEA spread the word via their social networks on Facebook, Flickr, UStream.tv and others.  By the time the contest period ended, there were 3,481 comments left across the 6 blog posts, and over 3200 Twittered contest entries. Most impressively, Kmart (green line indicator) increased their Social Media Index as measured by Vitrue a whopping 59%, outpacing parent company Sears and completely overtaking JC Penney:

For more data on the Kmart campaign, there is a full case study on IZEA CEO Ted Murphy’s blog, including the results of post campaign product awareness surveys.

Blogger Breakdown – How the Chosen Influencers Delivered Different Results

The part I find a little more fascinating isn’t covered in Ted’s case study – how did the bloggers differ from each other in regards to the success of the campaign? Who drew the most attention to the contest and why? Who drove the most traffic to the Kmart site or drove the most conversation about the campaign on Twitter?

Even though the numbers differ between the participants, it is important to note that no one person drove the success of this campaign. While we can statistically predict who might have driven the most awareness or sales, it is impossible to take one data point from the campaign and judge it separately from the rest of the campaign. Social media marketing is inherently holistic, and the success of parts of the campaign are very interdependent upon one another.

The Number of ReTweet Entries

• 933 - Chris Brogan
• 442 - Wendy Piersall
• 358 - Julia Roy
• 305 - Loren Feldman
• 260 - Jeremy Schoemaker
• 258 - Michelle Madhok

Chris Brogan leads the pack by more than double the number of any of the rest of us. This makes sense because Chris has the largest following on Twitter of all the bloggers in the campaign, and his participation spurred significant conversations in marketing circles about the ethics of sponsored posts.

By associating themselves with Chris Brogan, Kmart best achieved their stated goal of “increased brand perception through affinity with leading online influencers.” His reach on Twitter heavily influenced the overall awareness of the campaign for everyone involved.

The Number of Blog Comment entries:

• 871 - Wendy Piersall
• 630 - Michelle Madhok
• 468 - Chris Brogan
• 460 - Jeremy Schoemaker
• 370 - Loren Feldman
• 290 – Julia Roy

My post brought in the most comments of the campaign, and this makes sense for several reasons. The post was written on a contest blog on my Sparkplugging Blog Network, so we already had an established audience that was very receptive to the offer. Additionally, being able to participate as a mom on a blog targeted to moms, our readers were a fantastic fit with Kmart’s target market.

Sponsorships Taken on SocialSpark:

• 40 - Michelle Madhok
• 39 - Loren Feldman
• 39 - Julia Roy
• 38 - Wendy Piersall
• 34 - Jeremy Schoemaker
• 28 - Chris Brogan

40 individuals chose to promote Michelle Madhok’s contest over the rest of the participants. My educated guess as to why is because Michelle’s blog is a women’s shopping blog, and these blogs are the easiest to monetize as a small publisher. SocialSpark user blogs are more likely to be in this genre than the rest of the blogs in the campaign.

Click Through Ratio (CTR)

IZEA had a sophisticated tracking system in place, and one of the things they measured was how many page views each contest post received. This allowed them to determine the CTR of each view through to the Kmart website. While some of this data is confidential,  I can say that the average CTR of the campaign was 14.7%, and that my post on Sparkplugging’s Momsational delivered a pretty astonishing CTR of 85.6%.

How is it that my post could so drastically outperform the campaign average? Again, it comes back to the right brand paired with the right audience. If this had been a Harley Davidson campaign, I doubt I would have sent more than a handful of visitors to their website. Sparkplugging has an established audience that would naturally respond to an offer from a brand like Kmart, which is heavily skewed to moms who are seeking to either make extra money or save money.

Key Takeaways

For a campaign of this scale, it was wise of IZEA and Kmart to reach out to influencers with different strengths and different audiences. Where one blogger was able to deliver more awareness, others were able to deliver more traffic or conversation around the campaign. This multi-faceted approach was especially effective during the holiday season to ensure that they could achieve the best message penetration in a short amount of time.

IZEA’s multi-platform approach across the largest social networks on the internet ensured that the campaign built buzz. It’s also a testament to just how far the company has come from their start as PayPerPost. The success of this campaign led to significant new business for the company, including a similar campaign for Sears, a newly launched campaign for SeaWorld, and campaign in the works for Jim Beam Brands.

The best results are seen when a variety of initiatives are planned over time that support each other. In fact, this campaign supported a larger campaign by Draftfcb in Chicago touting Kmart’s Layaway program for the holidays.

As we can see, if IZEA had eliminated even one or two of these components, the campaign wouldn’t have been nearly as successful as it was:

• Choosing bloggers that have excellent reputations and who know how to respect the cultures of the communities they are a part of
• Creating a compelling story behind the campaign, “See what these bloggers bought at Kmart!”
• Offering a prize for the contest winners that was significant enough to warrant the attention it received
• IZEA’s infrastructure of bloggers in the SocialSpark program who effectively spread the word about the program
• The use of social media tools to encourage conversation around the campaign
• Simple and effective calls to action
• Measurement tools to track results

Kmart wasn’t the only one impressed with the results. The campaign was also covered by AdWeek, MediaPost, AdRants, and the Word of Mouth Marketing Association (WOMMA).

Brainstorming with other web 2.0 marketers is really one of my favorite things to do. In less than 10 minutes, we hatched a plan: find a sponsor to pay for the trip. Someone who would benefit from the exposure our network could offer them, someone who wanted to get in front of SOHO business owners. In a perfect networking storm, later that very day I met Barbara Jones from the One2One Network in a women entrepreneur breakout session.

Not even 2 weeks later Barbara and I were on the phone, talking about her client, Epson. They wanted to get the word out about their two new printers launching in the fall, and she approached me about putting together a contest and exclusive cocktail party for our readers. Before I knew it, I had the opportunity to pitch my idea to Epson

Since sponsorships and social media campaigns aren’t about advertising, I put together a proposal that didn’t include one single ad buy. We were going to do what we do best – create conversations and build buzz – but this time, we invited Epson to the party.

The Epson/Sparkplugging Word of Mouth Marketing Campaign Breakdown

As a business owner and an active participant in social networks, I had some solid assets to work with:

• The audience of Sparkplugging’s with 15 blogs, 14 writers, and a sizable monthly audience in Epson’s target demographic: women business owners
• A strong presence on Twitter, with 6 writers being active, regular, (sometimes fanatical) users
• The honor of being a featured speaker at the BlogWorld Expo
• An established audience interested in contests, kids printables and home office solutions
• An established local presence with other bloggers in a major metropolitan area
• An online reputation as a highly trusted person and company with a focus on supporting the online small business community

We put our proposal in front of Epson:

• Send our team of writers to BlogWorld, announcing that Epson has sponsored our trip
• We created a giveaway at the expo in which we played a Twitter game of “Where’s Wendy“, feeding clues to my whereabouts via Twitter. The person who found me won an Epson printer. The clues and responses used the #Epson hashtag and ranked as one of the conversation trends for the day.
• We created a new blog on the Sparkplugging network dedicated to coverage of BlogWorld. The blog was Epson branded and fed video interviews, photos and news stories about the event to our readers.
• The ability to mention Epson in my panel, as I led a discussion on selling advertising and sponsorships directly to advertisers and this campaign was a great case study.

We were also willing to obtain a booth at the event in which our Sparkplugging writers would be available for free blog critiques for BlogWorld attendees. The booth would have been shared with Epson and the ability to print pictures from the event instantly on site. Ultimately, approval for the campaign came too late to enable us to implement this portion of the proposal.

The trip was a huge success – we built significant buzz at the BlogWorld event, with coverage of the sponsorship also being mentioned on the BlogWorld site. Epson was thrilled with the increased conversation we created on Twitter around their brand. Our YouTube videos got thousands of views, as did the special BlogWorld/Epson blog on Sparkplugging.

Over the next few weeks, several of our writers received Epson products to feature and review on their blogs. We also ran a contest tive give away another printer to the Sparkplugging readers.

A month later, Epson hosted a Sparkplugging cocktail party in downtown Chicago for local women who are prominent in the social media space. About 30 women attended. The only Epson promotion we did at the party was to hire a photographer and print out pictures during the evening on the Epson photo printer to give to guests to bring home. This was extraordinarily effective because the quality of the prints spoke for themselves, and many people approached us asking for more information about the Epson products.

Lastly, in November Epson put together a package in which they created a landing page on their site that offered an exclusive Sparkplugging offer at a discounted rate. We ran ads and promoted the package via Twitter.

While we don’t have access to the sales totals of that promotion, we do have directly measured data from Quantcast that places Epson.com in the top ten domains that are visited by Sparkplugging visitors.

Key Takeaways

This campaign wasn’t a one-time promotion. Doing a variety of initiatives over several months was very effective in helping our audience to associate the Epson and Sparkplugging brands together.

We were cautious to never pull a hard sell approach at any point along the way. We had confidence in a great product that would sell itself if put in front of the right people.

It was the right product and the right brand for each other. Since Epson was targeting women business owners who are active in social media, Sparkplugging was able to deliver the perfect audience, and Epson was a brand that we were proud to be associated with.

It was reproduceable. Barbara Jones and her company, the One2One Network, were able to use this campaign as a springboard to reach out to other bloggers and women in social media, continuing the Epson promotion across several other sites.

And most importantly, with the Quantcast data, we have proof that the conversations we started on Sparkplugging led to greater brand awareness of Epson and a measured increase in traffic to their site directly attributable to our efforts.

Many of you have shared your personal stories of the pain of living with an alcoholic in your life in the comments below. I encourage you to share what you want, and read through what people have said as well.

I am not a counselor, and am not able to provide you with professional help with your situation. I do highly recommend the following resources that will hopefully offer you guidance and hope that you can get through this (yes, you can).

The Dance of Anger: A Woman’s Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships
This book literally changed my life.

Hazelden Books and Resources
Hazelden provides trusted resources to help prevent, treat, and recover from alcoholism and other drug addiction as well as other related disorders.

Al-Anon / Alateen
Al-Anon has one purpose: to help families of alcoholics.

I leave this post here, originally written in 2007, because of the thousands of visitors who come to this site every month seeking help as the spouse of an alcoholic.I also hope that it serves as an inspiration to you that you are not alone, and that you really can live the life you want – I’m living proof.

Ever since I wrote the Married to an Alcoholic series, I have watched in heartbreaking sadness at the keywords people have used to find this site:

• divorcing an alcoholic husband anger
• when is it time to divorce an alcoholic
• married to an alcoholic when should i leave
• how to leave your alcoholic husband
• how do i get my alcoholic husband out of our house
• married to an alcoholic, why am I so angry

To each and every one of you, first of all, my heart goes out to you. I have been where you are now. I did the Google searches too, seeking a way out of the pain and anguish of my everyday life.

But the truth of the matter is that you have found this site because you already know you can’t continue to live your life the way you are currently living it, with an alcoholic spouse at your side.

The answer is probably one you don’t want to hear, but it is the only one that will work for you:

Below are some questions you need to ask yourself. These are not easy questions. And don’t bother taking them on unless you are willing to give yourself honest answers. Set aside some time away from your home environment in order to give these questions your full attention, because you will likely get a bit emotional as you uncover your own truths:

• What is the cost of my leaving this relationship?
  • How will this decision affect others?
  • What will I leave behind?
  • What will I have to let go of?
  • What will I have to face within myself once I am gone?
• What is the cost of my staying in this relationship?
  • Who else is being hurt by staying in this alcoholic environment?
  • What will happen to my self-worth, my health, and my happiness if I continue on this path for another 5 years? Another 10 years? Another 20?
  • What am I teaching my children by staying in this relationship?
• What are the benefits of staying in this relationship?
  • I’m still here for a reason – what am I getting out of staying here?
  • Will these benefits continue for the rest of our lives together, or will they change with time?
  • Do these benefits outweigh the costs? Yes or No?
• What are the benefits of leaving this relationship?
  • What will I be able to achieve if I end this relationship now?
  • How will I be living my life differently in 5 years if I end this relationship now? 10 years? 20?
  • Do these benefits outweigh the costs? Yes or No?

Additionally, I would encourage you to take this decision seriously. I don’t know any person who has not ‘threatened to leave’ an alcoholic spouse as a leverage chip to try and get their spouse sober.

The problem is with the word “threaten”. If you say you will leave, yet don’t, you are reinforcing the fact that you think it is OK that they continue to drink.

So once you make your decision, you must also be willing to stick to it. And if you aren’t, then you aren’t in a position to make your ‘half decision’ a bargaining chip.

Remember also, if you decide to stay, then you must also take responsibility for that. You know at this point what staying means.

I can tell you this:

Making the decision to leave my husband was the ONLY THING that could have happened in his life for him to make the decision to get sober. I had to take a huge risk, knowing full well that I could have ended up single, or he could have been lying to me once again. So by sticking to my guns, in the end, I got what I wanted most of all. But I had to be willing to let that all go to raise my standards.

This may or may not be what happens with you. Your spouse may decide to continue to drink. You must be willing to face that reality if you are indeed going to decide to stick to your guns, too.
In the end, I did what I will tell you to do:

Follow your heart.

Only you know what is right for you – and your heart is where you will find that answer. I can say from personal experience that following your heart is not always easy, nor does it feel very good at times.

But in the end, it will always lead you in the right direction. Always. And it will feel good with time, and with continued listening. I can promise you this.

When I made the decision to leave my husband AND quit my job in the same week, I think most of my friends thought I was nuts. I think some of them even thought I was being irresponsible by letting go of all of the things in my life that held the tiniest shred of security. I doubted myself like crazy:

Tonight I wish I had positive questions to share, or a good reframe up my sleeve for myself. To be frank, I just want to crawl into a hole and cry my eyes out. But even when I do that it makes me feel worse rather than better. Because in that “hole” I look to everyone but myself to make me feel good and happy and I want anyone but me to take care of me. Thinking that way just feels like shit because it feeds into itself and makes me more helpless.

The ONLY reason I made the decision was because I absolutely knew with 100% certainty that my heart said this was the right course of action. I had absolutely nothing else to guide me:

My friend Alan is fond of saying that “The quality of your life is in direct proportion to the amount of UNCERTAINTY you are willing to live with”. Well, I’m living with a lot of THAT and I’m praying it means a higher quality of life, because it sure as hell doesn’t feel like it.

But the point is, that no matter what is uncertain right now, and it’s a LOT, I AM certain of the fact that I am on the right path. I may end up changing course at some point, and that will be revealed to me at a later time. Now I need to trust myself, trust God, and believe in my heart. My heart has brought me to this moment, and my heart has never led me astray in the past. I MUST trust that what I am doing is for my highest good, even though I feel like I just jumped off of a cliff.

I know now in hindsight that it was the ONLY course of action that would get me what I wanted – but I had to let go of all of my ideas about how I “should” be getting what I wanted.

I can’t take credit for getting my husband sober. I can take credit for changing the patterns in our relationship. The three most important things I did were:

1 – I raised my standards. I had been raising my standards for what I wanted to achieve for years. But only when raised the bar on what I was willing to ’settle for’ did things start shifting. I told my husband that I was not willing to settle for the relationship we had. That he needed to get into treatment or I was leaving. Period. Scary, too!

2 – I started expecting my husband to be the great man I have always known he is on the inside. So I treated him as though he was that man. When I thought of him, I focused on his talents, his strengths, his wonderful qualities. Every morning I would visualize him healthy, deeply happy, confident and sober. This was SO hard to do at first, especially when he was still drinking, lying and being emotionally abusive.

3 – I knew that if the man of my dreams walked up to my door that very day, he would walk away in a heartbeat. The man of my dreams wouldn’t settle for a woman who was living her life “settling”. I knew that I had to raise my expectations of myself immensely. I had to become a different woman if I was going to attract a different man.

I spent time getting in touch with who that woman would have to be:

• That woman would come from a place of love and understanding even when her husband was lashing out.
• That woman would refuse to take the bait when her husband picked a fight – instead, she would calmly state that she loved him and would speak to him later when he calmed down.
• That woman would choose integrity over being vindictive, not out of fear, but because she knew it would be the only way she could live her life.
• That woman would never settle for anything less than what she knew she deserved and was worth – even if she had to “fake it until she made it”

I’m not saying that it was easy – in fact, after he quit drinking, things got even harder before they got easier. But the shifts were so profound, so significant, and even though they were excruciating at times, I held to the one thing I knew I could count on – my heart.

And my heart was right – both my husband and I transformed massively once I focused on what I wanted, rather than what I didn’t want.

I was starting to become a true leader, my career (at that time, outside of the home) was skyrocketing, my relationship with my kids was getting more extraordinary every day, and people were looking to me for guidance and support.

In some ways, I felt like a fraud. Here I was, at the beginning seedling stages of launching my business in the self-help field, and I couldn’t seem to extract myself from my own unhealthy marriage. At the same time, there were a lot of things I had conquered in my life, and I knew I could legitimately help a lot of people – that is, I could help them to a point.

Around this time, I watched What the Bleep Do We Know. I was all about telling my husband that he was an alcoholic and needed help. But I cringed as I recognized my own addictions while watching this film – I was addicted to negative emotions: Anger. Rage. Resentment.

In fact, I contemplated writing an anonymous blog at the time about divorce and addictions – here’s an excerpt from one of my drafts:

The thing that rings most true with me tonight from the movie is the experience of emotional addiction, and how we get addicted to emotional states in the same way that a body can get addicted to cocaine, alcohol, or any other drug. Emotions are signals sent by the brain and our cells have receptors on them to receive the message – of anger, love, hate, passion, etc. I have been addicted to the anger, resentment, and rage I have felt towards my husband, as it is a way to meet my needs. It gives me certainty and familiarity, even if it’s painful. It gives me variety when our fights get out of control. It makes me feel important and significant because I can tell myself I am such a better person than he is. I feel love and connection with him, even through it all – and I’m working my tail off to connect more with myself.

I have all the incentive I could ever need to continue this way. When I am angry at him, he actually gets up off of his ass and does work around the house, and is sweet and loving. Why would I sit back and be happy with him? When I do he gets lazy, complacent, drinks again and takes total advantage of me. Only when I am angry does he become the man I want him to be (but even then, it’s not the man I know he is capable of being).

I feel so calm tonight seeing this all so much more clearly because he is out of town. I use my anger with him as a distraction for my own issues, primarily that although my life is great in so many ways, I am living up to about 20% of my full potential. I feel my unexpressed greatness weighing on me every hour of every day. My heart and intuition are driving me to greater action now, as I take steps to take control of my own addictions. I may not be an alcoholic, but I have not been able to control my emotions at home in any way, shape or form.

I was working with a great coach at the time. He knew everything that was going on – the failing relationship, the fact I was staying in a job for the money yet my heart was already starting up a new business, and the fact that we had only bought our house a few months prior, so I was feeling a little trapped.

Then he asked me the most PAINFUL question he could possibly ever ask.

“Wendy, how can you call yourself a leader, and expect to be able to coach people to raise their standards, when you aren’t willing to do it in your own life?”

It was a life changing moment. I WASN’T raising my standards. I WASN’T listening to my heart. I WASN’T living with integrity.

Within one week, I told my husband I was divorcing him and I quit my job. I knew I had to do it, but I’m not so sure I would recommend it as the best course of action… I could easily have slipped into forclosure, bankruptcy, and lost everything.

I risked it all because too much was at stake: My integrity and the safety of my children were on the line.

Read Part 2