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Whoa. What’s this?

I looked at my list and realized I was actually caught up.

Stop the presses!

No big projects and deadlines looming.  Nothing weighing on me business-wise causing me undue stress.  I was just going along at a nice easy pace … enjoying the business coaching I was doing.

This is a most unusual experience for me.  All my life, I’ve been a Type A overachiever who prided myself on my productivity.

I’m the girl who was in charge of the largest outdoor street festival in the Southeast for several years in the 90’s.  

I’ve always been diligent.  I love my lists of priorities and I’m pretty darned good at managing them. But up till now, my tasks and projects have always been a bit overwhelming.

So what changed?  How did I get to this new and wonderful place where I’m not feeling overwhelmed and behind all the time?

If you’re a professional, offering services to the public, you want your clients to think of you as a “trusted provider” … someone they know will take care of them and look out for their best interests.

Fact is, it often takes a long time to build that level of trust, comfort, and security.

And it can be lost in an instant.

Running a business presents you with a never-ending string of challenges. Sometimes they seem overwhelming … as if you’re playing a game you can’t win.

It’s the rare person who’s never experienced that sense of having too much to handle … of facing such big a gap between where you are now and where you need to be that you have no idea how you’re going to close it.

Have you ever been there? Of course you have.

Well, I’ve got a blazing insight for you … straight from the 5^th game of this year’s World Series!

I was “fired” by a client not too long ago.  Ouch.

What went wrong?

How many times have you heard somebody say, “Social media is the way to build a business?”

And how many times have you said to yourself, “But I don’t want to do it! I don’t like it. I don’t really understand it. I don’t have the time to learn all the ins and outs. It seems to suck up so much time and I’m not even sure it really works!”

That’s a good question.

Does it work?

Can you really attract new clients by sending out Tweets and posting on various sites and doing the whole Internet networking thing?

Business owners all over the U.S. are earning $100,000 to more than a million dollars a year by using speaking to turbo-charge the growth of their businesses.

Find out how you and your business can profit from speaking in our FREE webinar:

Rapidly Build Your Business By Speaking 

What You’re Not Being Told About How to Get Started

And How To Quickly Grow Your Business By Speaking! 

• Friday, September 22, from 12 – 1 pm ET. Click here to sign up.

We’ll show you how to get the best gigs, attract more clients and customers, and make more money!

I just received the nicest compliment.

I gave a speech to a group recently, and afterwards a man came up to me and told me how much he had enjoyed the presentation and that I wasn’t like so many of the other people he sees. He said, “You’re a real person…authentic. You want people to walk away from today with things they can use.”

Now, you might be saying to yourself, “Well yeah, that’s the speaker’s job, isn’t it, to inform and inspire?”

There are certain things in life you can never really explain. One of the more mysterious is personal chemistry.

What is it that instantly connects you vibrationally to one person while keeping you hopelessly out of sync with another? I dunno. All I can tell you is this. When it comes to hiring people for your business, it pays to hire people you really click with … people who really “get” you, your mission, your way of doing things.

But how do you know?

Sure, they have to be able to do the job, but people tend to really overvalue credentials and undervalue the importance of someone’s personality, style, and way of being in the world … the more subjective stuff … the stuff your rely on your intuition to clue you into.

What got me thinking about all this was my cleaning lady.

I want to tell you a story about a web designer I worked with a while back … not my current one.

Loved her work.

And as part of our contract, I was required to pay her in full upon launch of the site. Fine, but there were three pages that still needed to be completed after the launch … pages that were part of the original job. We agreed in a very specific email exchange what was left to do to complete the project.

Never happened. Once she got the payment, she was done. Finito. On to something else.

There’s a definite allure to running your own business.

You get to be your own boss, set your own hours.  

You’re not dependent on a corporate entity for a job, and when you’re successful, you’re the one who gets rewarded!

What’s not to like?  Everything about that looks great.

And so, a lot of people take the leap. 

But they often aren’t very clear on what they’re getting themselves into.

If you asked them the things they need to have in place to create and sustain a successful service-oriented business, would they be able to tell you?  More importantly, would they be able to do what it takes?