Why Not?

It has been a crazy week here.  I’m not sure how many times I gritted my teeth, with a pencil behind my ear, and said to myself in moments of despair, “what made me think I could work and be a mom at the same time?”  I’m grateful that those moments of despair were few and far between — but it is still unsettling that those thought have to come up at all.

The trouble with freelancing, is it’s often feast or famine. The work all comes in all at once – and when it comes, I have to deliver, regardless of how many clients are striving for my attention at one time..

When that happens, I wake up each morning, with a deliberate attempt to shift my thoughts from panic to gratitude by reminding myself just how hard it was to build my thriving client base back up to where it was before kids, when I had steady, mature, constant work, from the virtual non-existent client base that I deliberately chose for the sake of staying present with my children.  Today, I say, I have a client today,,, and I am grateful, I also tell every new mom I see, “to keep working on your work, however you define it, because someday, all you’ll have left is you.”‘

On most days, my passion and love for my work takes over.  Like it did during the I between moments of not doing such a great job of juggling career and mom,  A client asked me to write a marketing plan.  Part of me wondered if they were curious to see if I could really address their pressing problem — so many consultants had worked in it before, to no avail.  So, it was like they were saying, simply, “why don’t you give it a shot?”

At the same time, I believed their expectations were high and demanding,  So, I was a bit nervous.

I knew they were fans of Simon Sinek’s book, http://amzn.to/2dGEEnE, but I wasn’t quit sure how to incorporate that into the plan; but I knew I had to somehow. But I’d deal with that later– once I figured out what the missing link was to their expensive marketing problem.

So, weeks ago, I started my research, with the premise of already thinking I knew what the problem was.  The more I dug around, the more obvious the solution became.

But, at the same time, I wondered, if it’s this obvious, why have so many others overlooked this?

As self-doubt crept in, I started to think about how I was going to present this information, and knew that would make or break the presentation — while cutting oranges for the team for the night’s soccer game,

I looked over Simon Sinek’s famous Golden Circle diagrams, and the scribbles, and thought, why not?

Instead of an outlined report, with lots of boring text and graphs, I used Sinek’s pictures and created a visual report that explains the solution in factual, statistical detail.  A plan in pictures and graphs.

While I can’t reveal the client, or the plan, I’ll just show you a snippet of my 39-page document, all bound and ready to be presented.

And, I am so proud of my work here…making the moments of despair worth the effort.