The Sounding Board

Business discussions aside, I thought I’d share a couple of resources that I use to help manage day-to-day household kind of stuff. These two resources have absolutely nothing to do with business, but they sure do make my two most hated chores - menu planning and grocery shopping - a lot less cumbersome. (I love to cook, just hate the planning & shopping you have to do in order to be able to cook!)

Allrecipes.com is my favorite, and the one I’ve used the longest. Not only can you find great recipes for everything from breakfast to midnight snacks, but they have great time-saving features on the site too! For example, if you find a great recipe you want to try, you can add it to your online recipe box with a simple click. Then it’s easy for you to find later. To make it even better, you can also add the recipe ingredients to your shopping list, also with just a simple click. The shopping list takes all the ingredients from all the recipes you tell it to add, and breaks them down into an isle-by-isle kind of list (at least a department by department list, anyway…bakery items, canned foods items, deli items, etc. You get the idea!)

I love this site, I have to say. It makes menu planning a breeze! I let my kids go online to the site & pick out what they want to have for breakfasts, lunches, dinners, etc. They find something they think sounds yummy, they add it to my recipe box, and move on. When I’m ready to go shopping, I pull up my recipe box, see what the kids added, click the link to add it to my shopping list & off I go. It takes me less than 2 minutes to pull together our menu for the week & get my list ready. (My daughter - the budding chef in our house - prints out the recipes later & puts them on the fridge. When the kids ask ‘what’s for dinner?’ I just point to the fridge and tell them to pick something!)

Recipezaar.com is another site, similar to allrecipes.com that I’ve just recently found. Rather than having your own ‘recipe box,’ you can set up your own unique ‘cookbook’ from the recipes on their site. From there you can create a shopping list, plan a menu, etc. I haven’t completely explored all the features of the site, as I’m still kind of biased towards Allrecipes, but I’m playing around & having fun. I can definitely see it becoming another favorite.

The way I see it, anything I can do to help simplify or automate various aspects of my life, (like the chores I hate) the more time I have for other, more important things…like planning my next get-away with my favorite sexy Italian man (you know who you are, sweetheart!) or spending some much-needed down-time with my family, or working on the next big project for Virtually Yours. If I can save time somewhere, or make something easier, be it business or personal tasks, then hey! I’m all for it! When you wear all the hats (business owner, marketing department, bookkeeping department, personal assistant, mom, girlfriend, chauffer, referee, handyman, counselor, coach, writer, advocate, ad hoc teenage psychologist, chef, maid, butler, linguist (who hasn’t felt they needed a translator when talking with their teenagers!), and all around ‘hold that’ girl) anything you can do to make things work better, stronger, faster, or more efficient is a huge plus in your own favor.

Have a great resource to share with other business owners? Feel free to post it here in the comments section, or shoot me an email at sandi@virtuallyyoursllc.com & I’ll post it for you!

I’m delighted to announce an addition to the Virtually Yours staff!! As business continues to grow, I have reluctantly realized that I simply cannot do it all. (*GASP* Did I just say that outloud? In public, no less?!?) It’s time to take some of my own advice & bring in some help! So, I have brought in a very talented writer/editor, Roxann Keyworth, to assist with various copy & proofing/editing responsibilities.

Roxie was first published at the tender age of 16! She has since received numerous awards, scholarship offers, and professional accolades for her writing. Most recently, Roxie was sought-after by the journalism department of Eastern University of Utah. She instead accepted an offer to come work for yours truly while pursuing her journalism degree at Augusta State University, here in Georgia. So, keep an eye on The Sounding Board over the coming weeks, as Roxie will be adding her considerable talents to our blog, giving everyone an opportunity to experience her writing style as well as mine.

 Welcome aboard, Roxie! Cheers to your continued success!

We’ve all heard that phrase…’the fear of success.’ What exactly is that? How in the world could you be ‘afraid’ to be good at what you do? Isn’t that what every person wants? To be good at what you do and highly sought-after/in demand? Isn’t that what we work so hard to achieve in our professional lives? Most of us do, right?

But you know, there’s another well-known phrase at work here too…be careful what you wish for. You just might get it! What do you do when you ‘get’ what you’ve been working so hard at for so long? I can tell you from experience…pressure. Pressure to keep doing it, and doing it even better. That, in turn, can cause fear. Not so much fear of success, but fear of failure. Fear that you’ll get what you’ve been dreaming of all along, but you won’t be able to hold on to it. Someone will figure out you’re just a fluke. A one-hit-wonder, so to speak. If you’ve ever had a taste of that fear, it can affect future endeavors and make you wonder if you really want to succeed at what you’re doing. You know that if you succeed, the next step is to feel that pressure to perform….to prove you’re worth your own success.

For others, the fear of success may not be pressure-related. It may indeed be a fear of failure…finding out you really don’t have what it takes to succeed. It’s nice to be able to daydream about what it would be like to have, do, feel, experience, but what if you try & you don’t have what it takes? Can you live with that? This can block your path to your own success as well.

Women especially seem to have a fear of their own success. Succeeding will change life as you know it. It will change your relationships, your view of yourself, where your place is in the world you’ve created for yourself. That can be intimidating to some. There will always be those influential people in your life who will cheer you on, no matter what. But unfortunately, there will also be those whose own jealousy and fears will cause them to look for the slightest imperfection and seek to drag you down with them. That can be a scarey proposition, especially for women. After all, most of our lives revolve around the relationships we have with others. We are natural-born relationship builders. Changing the relationships in our lives, especially by our own power & decisions, can be a terrifying force to come to terms with.

So. How do you deal with fears about your own success? To be honest, I’m still working on this one. I do know that you have to identify what it is you’re really afraid of. Are you afraid you won’t measure up? Afraid you won’t be able to handle the pressure to continue performing? Afraid of what others will say or do? Not sure how you will handle the changes success may bring? Determining what exactly scares the beejeebers out of you will give you the first step in coming to terms with your fears of success.

How you handle it from there is entirely up to you. What works for me or the next guy, might not work for you. Where you go once you identify the core fears behind your success-avoidance is a question you’ll have to answer for yourself. I’m not in your head, so I can’t tell you what to do from there. (Heck, I’m still trying to figure that one out myself!) But I can tell you that until you figure out what’s really driving your fear, you’ll never overcome it.

For me, I have found that the best way to deal with my fears of success are to simply ignore that little negative voice in the back of my head. I don’t listen to it anymore. I can’t. If I give it an ear, that little negative voice will scream so loud it will drown out everything else. It will convince me that I don’t really know as much or can’t really do my job as well as I think it can. Before long, that fearful voice will have me avoiding work, avoiding the phones, and looking for any possible way to passively sabotage myself. Eeek! That would surely destroy all the work I’ve done to this point. I don’t want that to happen! So, I ignore that negative little voice. I’ve even been known to tell it where to go a time or two. And when it starts getting too loud, I take a bum day. I go out to the lake & spend the day enjoying the water & peaceful tranquility of natural beauty. It helps to remind me that I have work to do if I want to continue enjoying impromptu bum days at the lake. That’s enough motivation for me to re-focus on the positives & ignore the negatives. If I fail, I fail. Big deal. There are worse things that could happen. With that attitude, I can pick up where I left off and keep working…which is how I maintain the level of success I currently am lucky enough to have.

I love my success. I truly do. I challenged myself to do something & I did it! There’s no way in you-know-where that I’m going to let my fear of my own success taint that. So, I do what I can to cope with my own fears and keep going.

What are you going to do about yours?