I get sick when I hear the phrase “Take care of yourself so that you can better help others!”

It is such utter bunk and BS that my stomach turns. Excuse me while I down the ipecac.

It’s not about helping or taking care of others.

With the exception of your children, to whom you have an obligation based on their dependent and immature status, you are not obliged to help or take care of anyone. And, truth be told, you probably can’t.

Repeat: You are not obliged to help or take care of anyone. And even if you try, THEY have to do the work, meaning YOU – qua you – can’t effect any positive changes in THEIR lives!

Which is why so-called “self-help gurus” frighten me.

You know, the ones who say “Give up one episode of LOST so that you can respond to more people on Twitter!” or “Make yourself absolutely indispensable to people by reading this book and following these steps!” or “If you buy this video and follow this guru, magical manna juju will flow from heaven!” or “It’s your own damned fault if you feel resistance to completing this program, because you don’t love yourself enough to make wads of cash!”

Those guys.

Because they’re not in the business of helping you.

No, honestly. No matter what they say, they’re not in the business of helping you.

No matter how much value you’ve gotten from their writing or their speaking.

No matter how much they might genuinely believe they can or want to help you.

No matter if their heart – and yours – is in the right place.

They’re not in the business of helping you.

YOU have to do the work.

Self-help gurus DO have their uses. They can point out things in ways you might not have consciously considered. They can introduce you to resources you didn’t know existed. They can lead proverbial horses to water.

But YOU – and only you – turn that advice or those resources or leads into something useful.

It really is SELF help. Only you can help yourself.

That value you got from these people? That was YOU!

No one as insightful about your own life as you are. Nobody knows what you need better than you do. Fundamentally, nobody can give you any insight about your life that you do not already possess.

If you’ve gotten any value from consulting or self-help books/sites/tv shows in the past, it was not due to the sheer heaven-sent brilliance of the product’s hawker. It was because you were ready, willing, and able to capitalize on what you read, saw, or heard.

It was YOUR brilliance that made that stuff come through for you.

So please – for the love of all that is holy – realize your own power.

Stop giving your power up to gurus and buying a facsimile version back at extortionate prices. Stop measuring yourself by their standards and inevitably finding yourself wanting. Stop looking to people on the internet or on tv to tell you who you are and what to be, think, have, or do.

Pay them, if you wish, to point the way. Pay them to cast an objective eye over your thoughts, plans, or goals. Pay them – if you want to become a self-help guru – to tell you how they rake in the dough.

If they take the credit for YOUR hard work, they’re charlatans. If they give the credit to whom it belongs – to you – they might well be legit.

You’re the genius at the helm, and don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise.

Especially if they’re making money from your disempowerment.

That is all.

(side note: This may seem like special pleading, but it’s not. In this post I’m talking about people who request money for “soft” services like coaching or counseling or info products promising a “productivity” or self-esteem or other psychological boost – like the stuff you’d find in the “self-help” section at a bookstore. I’m not talking about people who do specific, concrete services or who sell consulting sessions or info products which teach you a specific, concrete skill. Like, for example, us.)

Related Posts:

• Making It Look Easy
• The List Is Life (or: Ma’am, step AWAY from the To Do List.)
• MacSpeech Dictate, Humanity in Product Reviews, and Doing Your Best Work

SELF Help: The Only Kind There Is is a post from: inspirIT

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about people who try to make it look easy.

Whatever “it” is.

Making difficult things look easy is a cultural obsession. The entire profession of advertising is built around it. And, depressingly, the trend continues online.

There are so many info products out there promising “10 easy ways to build your blog traffic” or “7 painless secrets to SEO stardom” or “23 ways to improve your website with no effort.”

Maybe these products really work. They probably do – but I guarantee you they take more effort to figure out or implement than the creators let on in the sales letter.

There’s a dark side to the culture of “easy.”

By making hard stuff look easy — or by not acknowledging that it’s hard — we do others a disservice.

Because not sharing how hard this stuff is for us sends an implicit message. The message of: “If it’s hard for you, it must be your fault. It’s easy for the rest of us!”

Even if you don’t mean it that way. Even though you don’t mean it that way.

Don’t get me wrong, here.

I understand that it’s difficult to sell stuff when you tell your customers “It’s hard to become as [successful/self-actualized/popular/tech-savvy, whatever] as I am. Putting in the time and energy and strain that I have in order to get to the place where I can write ‘51 Strategies to Help You Do X’ and sell 3 bajillion copies is hard. If you want easy, go work for The Man.” Yes.

I understand that sharing yourself and your life and difficulties and foibles and failings in a public forum is difficult. Yes.

You’re also not responsible for your customers self-attacking. If they hear “It’s your fault it’s difficult!” when you’re not saying that, then that’s Their Stuff. Yes.

But.

If your goal is to help people, meet them where they are.

Don’t come down to them from Olympus trailing clouds of glory. Don’t tell them that your new product ‘51 Strategies to Help You Do X’ will magically solve their issues, even if they leave it sitting on their hard drive because they’re so scared about making their mortgage payment next month that they have no mental bandwidth to consume your product, even if X is exactly what they need to do.

Don’t promise things you won’t or can’t deliver. No info product will solve everyone’s — or even most people’s — problems.

The answer: “I know it’s hard. It’s super hard. But I want to help.”

Make your products say to your customers what you’d say to a friend in distress. Make your blog posts say what you’d say to a friend in distress. Make your advice/consulting/communications say what you’d say to a friend in distress.

You’re in the business of offering empathy, whether you know it or not.

Empathy is your product. Meet your customers (your friends, in this close-knit web world) where they are. We’ll all be better for it.

Related Posts:

• SELF Help: The Only Kind There Is
• MacSpeech Dictate, Humanity in Product Reviews, and Doing Your Best Work
• The List Is Life (or: Ma’am, step AWAY from the To Do List.)

Making It Look Easy is a post from: inspirIT

I couldn’t look away from pictures of the Haitian tragedy.

Toppled buildings. People with serious injuries. People mourning the loss of their loved ones. Mothers wailing, cradling injured children in their arms. Heart-rending images of real people in the poorest nation in the Western hemisphere.

And I wanted to help, but I didn’t know what to do.

Then Charlie made a video.

The video asked people to find a way to help, if they could. Doing what they do anyway – but with a twist.

It jolted me out of my paralysis and into the realization that I could do something to help all the bereft people I saw in the pictures.

Here’s what inspirIT doing:

50% of any tech coaching purchase you make in January (whether a single hour or a package deal) will go to Doctors Without Borders.

Doctors Without Borders is sending doctors, nurses, medical supplies, and other necessary items to Haiti. Time is of the essence when dealing with a medical emergency like this one — so while we’ll be donating money for the rest of the month, please consider purchasing your sessions early so that DWB can get more early responders and medical gear on the scene.

You can go to the technology coaching page to read more about what we offer, and purchase your session.

You’ll get the top-notch tech coaching you need, and do a good deed at the same time.

Thank you for helping us help Haiti.

Related Posts:

• Tech Wednesdays – Black Friday Sale Edition
• Voice.

Coaching for Haiti is a post from: inspirIT

I have a To Do List.

Had a To Do List.

Unlike many, mine was not actually written on a stark page titled To Do with numbers and lines and arrows. Not for me the paper prison. My To Dos were scattered on tiny purple post-its, in mental notes and calculations, in tweets, and in the drafts folder of this website and Fictionette. All over the place. Much like my interests and commitments.

Until I realized something.

Herewith a list of things I realized:

• The only reward I was giving myself for getting something done was moving onto a new task – equally unmotivating.
• I wasn’t enjoying or even really noticing what I was doing in the moment.
• I was procrastinating like mad because I couldn’t see what my perpetual motion was getting me.
• The To Do List wasn’t actually working. In fact, it was making things worse.
• The list is life!

Let me explain that last.

I’ve met people who structure their lives by lists. Agendas. Schedules. Calendars. They have entire books of Stuff To Do. And the only reward they seem to give themselves for completing a task is to move on to the next one. Repeat, ad infinitum. Even the most important things in the world are on these people’s lists: playing with their children, date night with their husbands, writing X pages of their novel – whatever.

The problem is… these people are always living in the future. They want to get done what they’re doing at present in order to get on to the Next Big Thing. The next thing is always the goal and is always what they’re looking at – never what’s being done at present.

These people have put their lives on a ticklist. And they’re ticking away their precious hours, minutes, years without ever living in the moment.

I, too, was doing this.

Why?!

Here’s what I want instead:

Things To Amuse Small Children With When I’m 80 (TTASCWWI80).

No, I’m serious.

Think about it: are you going to be able to spin an enjoyable yarn for your grandchildren out of completing a To Do List? Will it impart to a small child even a semblance of a lust for life or enjoyment of the moment to hear “And the moral of my life, you see, son: I got a lot of shit done. Look at these lists. All ticked off!”

No.

And that’s the thing. “Living” life in the future means you’re not actually living. You’re just surviving. And bare emotional subsistence doesn’t make for many TTASCWWI80s.

A moment of backtracking.

I realize that there are Things That Need Done(tm) in the world. Taxes. Correspondence. Admin stuff. Going to the dentist. Not denying that.

What I’m denying is that we need to rush through these things to get to the Next Thing. I’m denying that we need to constantly live in the future and completely miss out on the joy and richness of the present.

Remedy: Be in the moment. Live the moment. Enjoy the moment.

Yes, even if it’s doing taxes.

Because the highest highs in life are so often far between (which is a good thing, I think – constant joy leaves us without a reference point to appreciate it), it’s imperative that we extract whatever simple joys or pleasures we can from our daily lives.

Otherwise it’s 1 or 2 moments of brilliant, light-filled, colorful triumph in our life, and 80 years of grey ticklists.

Live in the present.

Don’t live for the list. If you need to have a list to remind you to do your taxes and go to the dentist, that’s perfectly fine. But don’t let your list become a tyrant. Don’t deny what’s going on in the present or the possible enjoyment you can derive from it in favor of the constant go-go-go of the future.

Be with yourself in the present. Live your life instead of just getting through it.

Then you’ll start racking up those TTASCWWI80s.

Related Posts:

• Why I’m Not Buying Any More Info Products. (or: How Merlin Mann changed my game.)
• Entrepreneur Juice. (or: How Malcolm Gladwell Gave Me My Business Back)
• SELF Help: The Only Kind There Is

The List Is Life (or: Ma’am, step AWAY from the To Do List.) is a post from: inspirIT

Text Summary for the Video Impaired:

Last Tuesday I made a video post that promised a “slaughter fest” review of a piece of software called MacSpeech Dictate.

The software is pretty bad – but I think that promising to spend 800 words telling every particular where the software fell short (there was only one redeeming feature – that the company is on Twitter and one of their reps @ replied me when he saw I was in some difficulty) is a bad use of your time to read and mine to write.

This is a place where I think a lot of product reviews (and reviewers) fall short. They forget that there are humans involved – and that because there are humans involved, expectations and emotions play more into our supposedly “objective” product reviews than they’d like to believe. (After all, if I wasn’t trying to use this software to hurry up and finish my NaNoWriMo novel – i.e. if I’d not been on a super-tight deadline – I would have been much more patient and charitable, even though the software didn’t live up to the promises written on the box.)

Thanks to Danielle LaPorte (via Marissa) and Naomi for reminding me of these things without knowing they did.

In other news, I have an announcement. Or I will have an announcement. On Monday, December 14th. At a much more convenient hour.

And one last thing: is what you’re doing in your life or your business really playing to your strengths? Is it really fulfilling you? Is it really what you need to be doing? If it’s not, why are you doing it? Re-think your strategies, and see if you can’t align your actions better with your strengths and your gifts.

Yes, I say this because I’m working on it. Nope, inspirIT isn’t going anywhere – we’re keepin’ on keepin’ on, baby! – but I’m going somewhere with it.

Related Posts:

• SELF Help: The Only Kind There Is
• The List Is Life (or: Ma’am, step AWAY from the To Do List.)
• Vlog – How And When To Ask For Help… And Why We Don’t.

MacSpeech Dictate, Humanity in Product Reviews, and Doing Your Best Work is a post from: inspirIT

Sale Ends At 11:59pm Tonight!
There’s still time to get in on the love, and have us solve your technology problems! Get 20% off all of our technology coaching packages for you or a friend.

Today – December 1st – marks the one-year anniversary of my leaving Russia for the US.

It feels like it’s time, therefore, to do a little review of the first 11 months of 2009.

First Thing’s First

The thing that I’m proudest of and most grateful for is the fact that I started 2009 homeless and penniless, and am ending the year with a home, a business, and a network of wonderful friends and acquaintances.

These 11 months have been a huge roller-coaster – and I’m very, very thankful for all the friends, clients, and circumstances that have led me (and inspirIT!) to this place. If you’re reading this, you’ve given me hope, support, encouragement, or good energy somewhere along the way. And I can’t thank you enough!

Now… to answer some of Gwen’s questions!

Challenge. Something that really made you grow this year. That made you go to your edge and then some. What made it the best challenge of the year for you?

Building inspirIT. I had absolutely no ambition or intention to be an entrepreneur in January. Or February. Or March. Entrepreneurship snuck up on me, and learning how to build and grow a business (with all that entails) has pushed me into places I never knew I could go. I’ve felt elated, gutted, terrified, joyous, and… just about everything else in relation to this project. Often in the same day – or even hour!

Shop. Online or offline, where did you spend most of your mad money this year?

Etsy, totally. I love handmade things – and supporting the artists who make them! If you’re doing holiday shopping, please consider supporting one of the artists on Etsy.

Project. What did you start this year that you’re proud of?

Besides inspirIT, the project that I’m most proud of is my NaNoWriMo novel, Violante. It’s based on an idea I had when I was 12… and it’s been burning to come out since then. I’m so proud that I’ve started making that happen this year. I firmly believe that everyone is a writer and everyone has a beautiful novel in them – and I’m currently hard at work on a sooper sekrit project that (if you write) you’re going to love.

Word or phrase. A word that encapsulates your year. “2009 was _____.”

Better than I hoped, expected, or was ready for.

Giving Back

I’m not 100% sure yet, but I think 2010 is going to be the Year Of Giving Back. (I think it was Chris Guillebeau who first put into my head the idea of naming a theme for the year. Thanks, Chris.)

There’s no reason to wait until January 1st to start giving back, however. So here’s what I’m doing:

First, I’m giving back to the world. I’ll be volunteering at Charity: Water’s Charity: Ball on December 14th. If you’re in New York City on that day, come on out! It’ll be a fantastic event. I’ve also started lending to other entrepreneurs on Kiva – and it’s a fantastic feeling to be able to help someone in a less-developed country really make a go at building their own business. Oh, and – last but not least – some of my friends are going to receive farm animals from me this year. The animals will come from Heifer International, and be given to a poor family in my friends’ names.

Second, I’m giving back to our clients. You can still get 20% off on all our technology biggification consulting until 11:59pm tonight! It’s a great way to put your technology problems to rest in 2009 and start 2010 off with a clean technology slate.

Third, I’m giving back to all of you – or trying to. When you look back on 2009, please do it in a loving, supportive way – even if you had a bad year. If you’re here now, and in one piece, you’ve done a fantastic job this year. If you remember that you’re a sovereign, luminous, potential-packed human being, you’ve done a fantastic job.

With that, have a wonderful December and an even better 2010!

Related Posts:

• SELF Help: The Only Kind There Is
• The List Is Life (or: Ma’am, step AWAY from the To Do List.)
• Vlog – How And When To Ask For Help… And Why We Don’t.

Eleven Months in Review – 2009 in the rearview mirror is a post from: inspirIT

Our Black Friday Sale Ends December 1 at Midnight!
There’s still time to get in on the love, and have us solve your technology problems! Get 20% off all of our technology coaching packages.

Today’s Vlog is brought to you by two crappy buying experiences I had over this holiday weekend:

Summary For The Video Impaired:

The sound’s a lot better this time. And look at the sexy microphone. Whee!

I went to Google over the weekend to search for a place to buy a Windows XP license online. Google directed me to Microsoft’s website. All well and good. Except there was no information on the Microsoft site about how to buy XP!

They led me down 3 or 4 “Click here to get XP!” links… none of which actually allowed me to purchase the software. So Amazon got the sale instead.

Then I went to the MacSpeech website to purchase a copy of Dictate, their voice-to-text software. Not only do they not give an industry-standard 30-day trial of their software – but they don’t even offer the $200 paid version for immediate download! Essentially, they want people to plunk down $2o0 sight unseen for software they don’t even know will work.

So instead of buying it from the manufacturer and waiting 4 days for it to ship (I needed it right then), I went to the Apple Store and paid $217 for the 2 CDs and a crappy microphone headset.

And after all that, the software utterly blows. (Watch for a review of MacSpeech Dictate for this week’s Tech Wednesday.)

The moral of the story: Both of these companies lost out on quite a bit of money. And I will never buy anything from MacSpeech ever again.

Don’t do this to your customers.

Instead, take a clue from people who try to make it easy for their Right People to buy. Take a look at the page for our sale on technology consulting. I’ve gotten a lot of feedback that it’s easy to buy from. Or take a look at any of the sales pages that you’ve bought from.

Make it easy for people to buy from you, and you make more sales. Simple.

Related Posts:

• Return on Investment (or: How love puts food on your table.)
• Is Your Sales Funnel More Like a Sales Sieve?
• How NOT to SEO. (In which I receive a crappy pitch from a John.)

Vlog – How To Be More Successful Than Microsoft (hint: Make it easy for people to give you money.) is a post from: inspirIT

Black Friday Sales are legendary in America.

Once the turkey has been eaten and the naps have been taken and My Cousin Vinny has been watched, the only thing left to cap off the holiday is to view the news reports of grannies body-checking people in a mad bum-rush extravaganza for the season’s hottest toy.

Here’s how to avoid any possibility of bodily injury by a granny diving for a Furby for her grandson:

Shop online. Preferably on our site. And get 20% off any of our fabulous technology coaching sessions!

We’re offering this sale because a lot of people have said they need us, but money is tight around the holidays.

Your technology needs don’t stop, even if you’re trying to save up for holiday presents or travel, or if all of your sales happen around the holidays and you haven’t made any money yet. We understand how it is, and we want to help as many people as possible!

How the heck do you use all that stuff you just bought?

We can show you how. From setup to customization to making the new guy play nicely with the tech stuff you already have, we’ve got you covered.

Want to get your website in tip-top shape before the New Year or the holiday rush?

We’ll polish it till it sparkles!

Finally fix that issue you’ve been wrestling with for months.

You know… that one? It’s time to get it off your plate.

Everyone has some skeletons lurking in their technical closet.

We’ll help you clean them out. No matter what the issue is (and no matter how silly it might seem to you), we’d love to help.

Here’s how the sale works:

1. You go to our technology coaching page and get a session at 20% off the normal price.

2. We contact you to set up a time for your session. You can use it any time between now and January 31st, 2010. (If you’re buying more than one and won’t be able to finish them all by January, we can work something out!)

3. Charlotte calls you and mad biggifies your technology, yo.

Mini-FAQ:

• Can I buy sessions for someone else? – Yes, absolutely. Just send us an email and let us know who to schedule the session with.
  
• When does the sale end? – 11:59pm on Tuesday, December 1st.
• Why buy now? – Because we’re not going to have another sale until after New Year. And because the sessions are fabulous. And because you know you need them!
• Where do I go to purchase my sessions? – Here!

Questions?

Send us an email at info@inspir-it.com or use the form on our Contact Us page.

See you soon! And Happy Thanksgiving!

Related Posts:

• Coaching for Haiti
• IE6, Why It Must Die, and What You (Yes, you!) Can Do About It
• Review: Google Wave (Public Preview edition)

Tech Wednesdays – Black Friday Sale Edition is a post from: inspirIT

Welcome, dear friends, to my first ever Vlog post!

This one is 8 minutes long. The volume is a little soft – but the next one will definitely be better.

See it here:

Summary for the non-video-watchers:

In our society, we’re often told to “cowboy through” things. To be independent. People who ask for help are seen as weak or bad.

Sometimes it’s good to cowboy through things (because most people are better at things than they think they are, and can use the experience as a confidence-booster), but there comes a point when it’s better to ask for help.

Short tip for those in the service business (which is everyone): Make it super easy for people to ask you for help. There’s a threshold you have to get over – people won’t ask for your help until the pain of NOT asking for help is greater than the pain of asking. So reduce the pain of asking!

Short tip for everyone who needs help: You want others to ask you for help, so don’t be scared to ask others! Good people are there to assist you and won’t laugh at you, no matter how silly your question seems to you. That’s why they’re in business!

Some of the excuses we give for not asking for help:

• It’s too expensive.
• I don’t know if anyone can really help me.
• People are going to laugh at me!

Those excuses are just that – excuses. And good coaches will help you recoup your investment of time and money.

If you think you can’t afford help, it may be true – but it’s equally true that you can’t afford not to get help.

And some misc stuff that makes me happy:

• I’m going to Philadelphia tomorrow to see friends for Thanksgiving. Yay!
• I’ll be volunteering at Charity:Water’s Charity:Ball on December 14th. Come join the party if you’ll be in NYC!

Have a great Thanksgiving!

Related Posts:

• The List Is Life (or: Ma’am, step AWAY from the To Do List.)
• You ARE What You Do. (Repeatedly.)
• How And Why To Dance Around In Your Socks

Vlog – How And When To Ask For Help… And Why We Don’t. is a post from: inspirIT

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”
– Aristotle

We’re told so often by gurus of various types to decouple our beings from our workaday actions. “You are not-” they say emphatically, “what you do.”

Bull.

Admittedly, most of these gurus mean to stop us pigeonholing ourselves in the dead wastes of dead-end careers that have nothing to do with who we really are on the inside. After all, very few of the people they work with are jumping for joy at the thought of being an actuary or a janitor.

Well and good – but when the gurus cut their clients off from “pigeonholing” themselves in an effort to jolt them out of their limited world, they also introduce a whole set of unnecessary baggage.

“We become just by performing just actions, temperate by performing temperate actions, brave by performing brave actions.”
– Aristotle

If you write, you’re a writer.

If you paint, you’re a painter. If you parent, you’re a mother or father. If you’re helpful and generous on a daily basis, you’re a nice guy. If you’re not, you’re an asshole.

Repeat ad infinitum.

You can be all those things at once.

You could be a writer/painter/parent/nice guy. Or a philosopher/entrepreneur/writer/moral human. Or a waterskiier/uncle/mountaineer/asshat.

Here’s one thing the gurus got right: humans are multifaceted. Infinitely so.

Putting yourself in one “pigeonhole” doesn’t mean cutting off the rest of your humanity, in the way people often do in answer to the dreaded cocktail party question “So… what do you do?”

Here’s the good part about this:

So many of the things we aspire to be really don’t come with the baggage we try to associate with them.

Do you write on a daily or weekly basis? Poetry, fiction, nonfiction, memoir – even a daily journal?

Then you’re a writer.

By definition. Without the need to go out there and be Stephen King or P.G. Wodehouse or Jane Austen.

Do you act in a kind and gentle manner towards your fellow creatures? Try to live by a code of ethics consistent with how the universe behaves?

Then you’re a moral person.

By definition. Without the need to resort to organized religion or anything else which tells you in minute and guilt-ridden detail how to do what comes to you naturally.

And here’s the bad part.

It works the other way, too.

If you don’t write, you’re not a writer.

If you don’t act well towards your fellow human beings, you’re not a moral person.

No matter how much you think and wish and make excuses for yourself, and no matter how many excuses others make for you – if you don’t do the work, you can’t claim the glory.

“Excellence is an art won by training and habituation. We do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have those because we have acted rightly.”
– Aristotle

Chicken? Egg?

Which comes first – the actions or the label? And if the actions come before the label, then where do the actions themselves come from?

That’s a longer story than you probably realize – and not one I can easily get into in a blog post.

More good news: You are the person you are right now.

This might all seem a bit deterministic to you.

“I’m a lazy person,” you think. “Which means I’ll never be more than a lazy person. Thanks for the ‘help’ there, bucko! You suck!”

Not true. Not true at all.

Because what we are is based on our actions, we only need to change our actions to become a different sort of person.

If you want to be a writer, write.

If you want to be a gardener, garden.

If you’re a lazy person, talk to someone to figure out the cause of your procrastination. (It probably has nothing to do with what you’re actually trying to get accomplished.) Work on the source, and jettison actions that add nothing to your happiness and well-being.  Become more effective.

If you’re an angry person, go to anger management classes. Stop blowing up at your wife and children. Take a minute to cool down when you feel the rage rising. Become a better man.

If you’re a depressed person, go to counseling. Figure out where the depression comes from. Work on those causes, and improve your self-esteem by realizing that you’re a delightful, effective human being who good people genuinely want to be around – if only they could see who you are.

I only say this because I’ve done it.

A few years ago, I was a lazy person. An angry person. A depressed person.

It’s taken me a couple of years and a great deal of introspection and help from many, many people. (And lord knows, I’m still not perfect by any stretch.) But I have improved myself and my life.

It’s possible – whether your life (or even your day) needs a massive overhaul, or just little tweaks.

In large part, you determine your destiny.

You’re in the driver’s seat. Go out and be the type of person you admire.

Related Posts:

• How And Why To Dance Around In Your Socks
• The List Is Life (or: Ma’am, step AWAY from the To Do List.)
• Vlog – How And When To Ask For Help… And Why We Don’t.

You ARE What You Do. (Repeatedly.) is a post from: inspirIT