When was the last time you put your life on mute?

Today as I was driving to work, which is a 45 minute drive with no traffic, I resisted turning the radio on. Being early on a Saturday morning, there was no one I could call on the phone, so I drove in silence. What a wonderful thing.

About halfway through my trip I became aware of the creativity of the thoughts entering my head. I actually ended up resolving an issue I had been struggling with and came up with 2-3 ideas for articles. My brain was on fire. It wasn’t until I turned off the noise that I could hear it.

In the last few years before we cashed out of ACT, I didn’t realize how deprived I was of my creativity. The din of activity was constant. It wasn’t until I quieted my life that I rediscovered the my previously-dormant imagination.

As entrepreneurs, especially for those of us who are also parents, it is hard to find time to be quiet. For me, I had to take advantage of being in the car. Whatever works.

If you’re an entrepreneur, I hope you are planning to take some away from your work for the holidays. Take a look at what I had to say about that in a recent article on Smart Money Magazine’s website.

How much do we go through life surrounded by noise? When do we enjoy the silence other than when we’re sleeping? Try hitting the mute button on your life and you’ll be amazed what emerges from the depths of your mind! You’ll be glad you did…

A couple of things I wanted to share tonight…

I found Family Matters Radio on the internet and after listening to a couple of interviews by Caroline and Jacquie, I just knew I wanted to talk with these dynamic women! We had a fun conversation - check out our radio interview (scroll down to the audio portion)…

I’ve also been participating in a lot of interviews lately which have recently landed on Nielsen’s Small Business Resource Center, Entrepreneur Magazine, and even my home-town Baltimore Sun! Check out Make Your Marketing Plan Matter along with all the other great small-business resources they have there as well as Small Businesses Can Make Performance Reviews Positive Experiences. I was able to get a book mention in Entrepreneur magazine story called The Brighter Side: Transforming a Negative Experience into a Positive Business Idea (sounds like me, doesn’t it!?), but I am looking forward to seeing the quote in print (it looks small on the internet!). As the list keeps growing, keep checking on my Press page to see what’s new.

There was a lot of good stuff that didn’t make it into the articles so I am guessing I am going to have to expand on these in the future…

Erin, whom I wrote about in an earlier post, has created a website asking for financial assistance this holiday season. She needs help in paying off her medical bills and providing a Christmas for her 3 sons. If you’re looking for a cause to give to, this one seems extremely worthy!

Ok, so most people don’t consider failing to be a joy. In fact, I know a lot of people who would rather not try something than risk failing. In my opinion, this is a depressing way to live, especially if you’re an entrepreneur, for a number of reasons:

• Some of the best lessons in business and life are learned through failure. As my father once told his high-school teacher, “I can not fail if I learn something from the experience.”
• If you’re not failing, you don’t know really what you can do. It isn’t until we push the limits into a new market or trying out a new service that we discover how much and how far we really can go.
• Just because we fail, doesn’t mean it can’t be done. The old story about Thomas Edison and the light bulb. In building over 1,700 models before he found one that worked, he said “I just found 1,700 ways not to make a light bulb.” Learn from it and try again, taking what you’ve learned with you.

I can’t even count the number of times I’ve failed, though I don’t really look at it like that. I prefer my dad’s view of ‘no such thing as failure.’ I actually celebrated the first rejection letter that I received from a publisher when I sent out proposals for The ParentPreneur Edge. I figured someone wasn’t going to want it, I might as well get the failure out of the way. Strange as it may sound, that rejection actually got a “WooHoo!” from me.

From a business perspective, most people don’t really make it BIG until their second or third business. So if you have an idea and it doesn’t work out, just look at it as one down, two to go!
I believe embracing the possibility (and the inevitability) of failing is liberating! Martha Beck has a great article on failure in O Magazine this month called The Woman Who Fell to Earth: To Fail is Divine that you should check out. She clearly agrees with this philosophy! Also check out Sara Reistad-Long’s arcticle in the same magazine that offers tips on how to Turn Your Regrets into a Life Booster. Refreshing!

So I am curious - how do you deal with what others might consider failure? What do you do to move on?

Yes…there is such thing as too much of a good thing, especially on Thanksgiving. Too much food. But it has been an incredible day. I got to play in the leaves with my kids and then come inside and make a home made apple pie with them. It was a small gathering, but it was nice. We were able to take our time, not worry about how messy the kitchen was or try to make everything happen at a certain time. Just perfect!

For those of my friends in the United States, Thanksgiving provides a time for us to reflect on what we are thankful for. A recent e-mail from a woman in upstate New York really brought that home for me.

Erin contacted me earlier this week looking for help with her business idea. She has a vision of an organic plush toy line that will be eventually expanded to include bedding products. In talking about what is needed to get her business off the ground, she broke down and revealed to me that they were drowning in debt and couldn’t see how she could finance her start-up. Not an unusual story unfortunately. But it is a little different for her. Her 3-year-old son (the youngest one in the photo) was diagnosed with Leukemia a little less than a year ago. A couple months later, her 8-year-old son was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes. Each of those are tough to handle alone, I can’t imagine dealing with both in succession.

She’s come to realize over the past year how precious the time with her three sons is. Erin’s goals for her business is to build something she and her kids can be proud of, but work that will also enable her to be more available for them. Starting a business to take control of your life…does that sound familiar to anyone else?

Those of you who know me, know what my first thought was – “how can I help?” Because I have been burned before – and hundreds of stories of scams float around on the internet – I knew I had to verify that this wasn’t one of them. I asked for copies of the medical bills and Erin quickly complied. She isn’t trying to scam anyone…she is just trying to get on with her life after a series of unfortunate events.

My immediate response to Erin’s story was one of thanks. I am thankful for all of the blessings I have received: I am healthy, my children are healthy and we have a nice home. Truly, we have everything we need. That thought alone compels me to give back in the spirit of thanks.

I am working with Erin to set up an account with a local church so that those of you who feel the need to help like I do have a way to donate to her cause. Please e-mail me if you’re interested in helping and I hope to post the information on how you can help soon!

Whether you are a parent or not, you have had to make choices between personal and professional. Read my guest blog over at my friend Ponn Sabra’s blog on how I make those choices. And while you’re there, take a look at the cool tools she has to offer entrepreneurs for marketing over the internet through her EmpowerWomenNow.com website. Her e-book on creating a search-engine optimized press release is chock-full of valuable insight!

As a child, I loved my music. Of course, that was back when we had to rely on the radio or our own album collection to hear our favorite songs. The result was that we either spent a lot of money on music or listened to the same songs over and over. I didn’t have much money, so I scanned the radio stations constantly. I found that just by hearing the right song, my mood could go from melancholy to pumped in 3:35.

For some reason, I forgot how much music can impact my thoughts, ideas, and mood until I got my iPod. It is one of those devices I resisted (I didn’t have TIME to mess with that!) and now I can’t live without. I’ve created play lists for inspiration, to lift my mood, and to make me cry (why do we women do that?). I bunched together songs for working out to and for making me feel EMPOWERED.

Sometimes it is the lyrics. I listen to Tubthumping by ChumbaWumba to remember that “I get knocked down but I get up again, you’re never gonna keep me down.” Life goes on.

Try and keep frowning while listening to Walkin’ on Sunshine by Katrina and the Waves.

Other times, a song from my past brings back a specific feeling. Like Wild Wild West by Escape Club - it makes me feel EMPOWERED. Not because of the lyrics, though. It came out about the time I graduated from college and took a job 1500 miles away from home. My first assignment was 6 months in LA where I would be living on company expenses the entire time. WOOHOO! Livin’ in the wild, wild west!

My more-recent song of empowerment is Unwritten by Natasha Beddingfield. Check out the lyrics and let me know if they inspire YOU!

Do you use music to guide your mood? Maybe you use music to guide you into meditation, visualize your goals, or just have a good cry. Powerful stuff!

An article today in the USA Today “Work or Stay at home: It’s Still Quandary For Moms” re-sparked the age-old mommy wars. Why does the press see it as only a two-sided choice? Let’s get the debate REALLY started!

First of all, a war requires two parties to disagree. I have a lot of friends who stay at home with their kids and I have a great respect for them. I don’t judge them because they made a different choice in life and they don’t judge me for working, at least as far as I know. If we would just quit worrying about what other people think, the other side would get tired and leave us alone. After all - no one likes to pick a fight where the other party isn’t fighting back, such as how Sabrina Parsons, CEO of Palo Alto Software, handled an insensitive remark from a colleague. It could have started a war. In response, she simply smiled, brushed it off, and focused on getting home to see her boys. I believe the reason she was able to do that so easily is that she is at peace with her own decision to continue not only working after having kids, but running a successful software company. If more women were at peace with their own decisions there would be no war.

Secondly, it consistently amazes me that most of these “Mommy War” reports leave out the option exercised by so many women to start their own business. Granted, not all moms are cut out to run a business but I maintain that there are a lot more women out there who haven’t realized they fit the bill as a “woman entrepreneur” yet. Do they see it as ‘unattainable?’ It is hard, to be sure, but if you find the right path it is SOOOOO worth it! And for those naysayers who say you can’t be a good mom and be serious about your business…tune ‘em out like Sabrina did!

I am sitting here watching one of my all-time favorite movies “A League of their Own.” In addition to being really funny, it has some great quotes to inspire entrepreneurs and other success-driven people.

• To achieve the incredible you have to attempt the impossible. Wow - SOOO true! How many times do we let the obstacles keep us from even starting something?
• There’s no crying in baseball. I love this one, too. It’s OK to have a pity party, but at times you need some tough love. My equivalent to some of the women entrepreneurs I work with is “put your big girl panties on and deal with it!” Same thing although coming from Tom Hanks it does sound a little better.
• It’s supposed to be hard. If it wasn’t hard, anyone could do it. It’s the hard that makes it great. Bingo. Building a business is hard. Achieving your dreams is hard. But that is what makes the accomplishment all the sweeter. Remember that next time you reach a gut-check or it gets too hard. How bad do you want it?

The added bonus of this movie for me is it was the last movie I watched with my dad a week before he died. The cancer had moved to his brain and he had trouble understanding subtle humor, but the outright funny scenes and one-liners in this movie made him laugh. To this day, it makes me laugh and cry - sometimes at the same time. What a great gift.