This is story number 22, and it comes from Becky Knight of Living Sexuality who asks:

Q: “How do you balance “spreading your wings” with tending to your “nest.” As someone who works full-time outside the home and has three kids, I don’t sit down until 9pm every night. I have very little time or energy to put into the things I want to do for myself professionally. Do you have advice or suggestions on how to balancing the obligations I have to myself with the obligations I have to others?”

A: I work with a lot of solopreneurs, and believe me, you are not alone in this challenge. We could write a whole unit on each of the three categories you’ve mentioned here: home, work, and self. But for now, let’s focus on how to find time to do what you want to do professionally, while still keeping the home fires burning.

Let go of being houseproud.  When I was a newlywed in 1992, I read a modern British housekeeping book that encouraged scrubbing the toilets and sinks every day. What?! This in not the 60′s and you are not on the cast of Mad Men. Put down the vacuum cleaner and let the dust accumulate on the mantle piece. Martha Stewart is not coming to dinner and those who love you are not going to look under the bed. It’s amazing how little housework you can do — and still have a safe and relatively tidy home.  Here are some things I can think of right now that will release you’re time: ignore the cobwebs; be okay with “assembled” dinners; let the junk drawer stay junky, don’t clean bits of the “guest” bath that never get used until right before a guest comes; don’t by stuff you have to iron (you’re never gonna wear it anyway.) There. I bet you feel better already.

Enlist Your Family. America, we are coddling our children. Preschoolers can serve themselves dinner from a common serving dish, kindergartners can sort the laundry, grade schoolers can take out the trash. Why are you doing it all? Here’s are my number one and two tips for releasing your time by enlisting your family. 1. Teach everyone to load the dishwasher. 2. Sort the clean laundry into a basket, one for each family member. Holler at the family members to come take their basket upstairs. Viola. You are done.

Don’t Over-Program Your Kids. The fewer soccer/ballet/fencing/potter classes you run around to, the more time you’ll have for your own personal development. We are designed to be life-long learners. That means Mom’s get to learn and develop themselves too. Period.

Know Your Purpose. I’m taking a course with Gary Barnes right now, and his big premise is that the results you are getting are on purpose. If  you are getting results you don’t want, stop and make sure you have the right purpose. What do you want to do for yourself — professionally or personally? Write your purpose statements down, post them, make them your priority. This will take a lot of trust. You’ll need to trust that it’s okay for the  the stuff that falls away to go away.  You might end up living a simpler life — a life that looks much different that your neighbors and peers. But you will be living according to your passionate purpose. And that will be totally worth it!

Build a Support Group. If you are trying to develop something professionally for yourself “on the side” — either in addition to your regular work, and/or in addition to your family life, you’re gonna need a team. Find just two other people who are also setting on-purpose professional goals. You can meet with them in person, or on the phone with free conference calling websites. Set quarterly goals and check in with each other once a month to see how things are going. Brain storm through your stuck spots, and offer each other tips. You’ll be amazed how much this helps!

Reconsider your Finances. Your time is valuable, and the time you invest now on meeting your professional goals will pay off in funds later. That means you might have to invest some funds now in services to help you reach those work goals. Some counter-intuitive ways to make more money is to hire a once-a-month housekeeper, pay for an after-school babysitter, or even get a virtual assistant to help you with some of the grunt work. Even in a tight budget, making time for your personal business project by investing in home-life help can bring in a big bang for you buck when your business is up and running.

Use What You’ve Got. If you’ve been working on a professional project for awhile, you probably have more resources than you think. That flier you wrote would be the good basis for a class at the community center. Those blog posts could turn into a for-pay ecourse or ebook without much effort. Those lectures you presented at your professional association could be re-presented in front of a webcam and turned into a video series. I’ll tell you a little secret…shhh…not everyone has seen your work yet.  Take a hard, creative look at the materials you’ve already amassed and package them for re-sale.

Acknowledge the Small Steps. Chances are, you are spending a lot more time on your professional development that you think you are. Writing one blog post, sending out one resume, making contact with one potential client — these are all big achievements when your world also happens to consist of a full time job and parenting a couple of offspring. Keep an achievement scroll handy and write down every small step you take. Don’t fall into the trap that you can’t get anything done unless you have a big block of time. Winnowing away at a larger project ten minutes a day will get you to the same place that spending 3 hours on it in one day will. Maybe not as quickly, but what’s the important part? Getting there quickly, or getting there at all. Accept your small opportunities and watch the build into a big dream. Or keep resisting the small options, wait for the big break, and be right where you are this time next year.

Accept the Seasons.  Toddlerhood. Health Crises. Moving. Job Loss. There are times in life when it’s just all hands on deck for the homelife. It’s okay. Seasons come and seasons go. Winnow things down to the basics, don’t take on more than you need to, and trust  God and The Universe that things with turn, turn, turn.

What about you? What are your tips for finding time for your personal projects? How have you made space for professional development when time and money is tight? And how do you balance being a parent and being a person. Give us all your best tips and stories in the comments below. We need you! Because “there ain’t no place to go, but together.”

Much Warmth,

Rachelle

30 Stories : 30Days – The Collection

Story 1: What is the intersect between work and play and how can I find it?
Story 2: How has your spirituality shaped your sexuality?
Story 3: IRL and Online Friendships: same? different? balanced.
Story 4: How can I connect with my neighborhood?
Story 5: What do I do if my partner and I have different faiths?
Story 6: What are you doing to make a difference in this world?
7tory 7: What is your highest high and what can you learn from it?
Story 8: What role has massage played in your life?
Story 9: How can I make administrative tasks a creative/spiritual practice?
Story 10: What has it meant to you to have your birthday so near Halloween?
Story 11: How can I manage resistance around my art?
Story 12: I want to establish some kind of spiritual practice. Where do I start?
Story 13: What is your primary spiritual practice?
Story 14: Do you prefer living in Europe or in the U.S.?
Stroy 15: How does nature affect your spirituality, and why do you say you have a soft spot for Pagans?
Story 16: As your spirituality expands, does God stay personal?
Story 17: How can I pursue my dreams, do the have-to’s, and not burn out?
Story 18 How can I create a spiritual community?
Story 19: What has it been like returning to the U.S. after living abroad?
Story 20: How can you create balance in your on-line life?
Story 21: How can I start a soultribe?

Also, I am a terrible actress.

So today I want to give you little peek into the neurosis that is me, trying to build a model for my work that is sustainable. (ie. some stuff for free, some stuff for fee) 

As you know, I’ve recently launched an online soul spa, Flock: Soulcare with Magpie Girl. You may also have heard that I’m in the process of writing a book and creating content for several ECourses. Oh, and P.S., revamping my website. Right now most of these are in various stages of production, and all of them are stuck until my lovely designer can finish the artwork. (Apparently this does not happen by magic, nor overnight. Damn.)

Oh, and p.s. more money is going out than is coming in.

I have been blogging for 7 years, false-starting books for the last 3, and trying to figure out how to offer soulcare to a happy band of misfits for as long as I can remember. Now, when I’m ready to send things out in the world I feel stymied and stuck.

I can’t tell if I’m “going slow to go fast,” or just fucking things up.

My Gremlins are telling me that I’m charging to much, and that people don’t like me, and that my lack of art and computer skills are going to bog me down forever. Basically all the normal things the Gremlins say.  I’ve fed them taffy and made them martinis– I’ve even taken them out for a walk,  and nothing is calming them down.

So here is what I am going to do:

1) I will tell you True Things about this process.
2) You will SEE them.
3) This will help the Real feel  more Real. 

So if you could, if you wouldn’t mind…after reading this could you please put a note, or at least “I SEE  YOU” in the comments? That would really, really help.

Thanks!

1. “Honoring my Work Makes it More Powerful” — This is my mantra. It reminds me to charge for things. (I have to say it a lot.)

2. Heretics break new ground. Don’t fear the stake.

3. “It’s all happening.”

4. Your creative pattern is “wait, wait, GO!”  Watch for the green light.

5. You don’t have to be afraid of being big…

6. …and Small is Beautiful.

7. Generosity is a form of wisdom. Even if the people you promoted don’t promote you back, it is still worth taking the time to help out.

8.Eventually you will tip, go viral, and find (more) of your people.

Okay folks, time for me to go back to creating products. I knew I could count on you!

Thanks for being here.

Lately I’ve been using muscle testing to determine what to charge for the things I’m offering on line. Muscle testing is great for getting around chatty Gremlins and circumnavigating self-sabotaging thoughts.  Here’s how to do it in a few easy steps. (You’ll need a friend to help you.)

Write the different prices you are considering for a service on small pieces of paper. Create a whole range of options, from the lowest you’ll go to the highest you could hope for. If possible have whatever you are setting a price for in your line-of-site while you do the muscle test.

First, shake your hands to discharge any tensions or energy you are holding around the price setting process.  Ask your friend, the Tester, to do the same.

Extend your non-dominate hand out to one side. Have your Tester press down on your forearm to gauge how much strength you generally have in that arm. (The Tester can put one hand on your opposite shoulder for counter balance, but this may not be necessary.)

Now hold the first price in your other hand. Extend your non-dominate arm again and have your Tester press down on it with the same amount of force. If your arm remains strong, your body is intuitively telling you that is the right price. If it weakens or goes down, it’s the wrong price.

Between each price test, move away from the slips of paper and shake off your hands. (Have the tester do the same.) When you hold each price in your hand, think about the thing you are offering and imagine charging that price to someone.

You can also do this “blind” by folding the pieces of paper in half. It’s interesting to see if you get the same results.

If you get a range of prices with the same strength, you could play within that price range. Maybe you get $35, $40, $50 equally strong. Make $40 you base price, $35 your discount for people who are on your mailing list, and $50 the price you bump up to as the service expands.

For more tips on Resonate pricing, Pam Slim has an excellent round-up here, including posts from Mark Silver of Heart of Business, and Naomi Dunford of Itty Biz.

What techniques to you use to make sure you are setting the “right” price for you? And how do you stick to your guns once you set it? Do tell in the comments below! Thanks for being here.

A few months back I was honored to give an interview at Kristin Tennant’s excellent blog, Halfway to Normal. (I LOVE being interviewed!) Kristin asked such good questions, I thought I’d run it again here for folks who want to know more about the process behind Flock: Soulcare with Magpie Girl. I hope you enjoy it. And do stop by Halfway to Normal, where Kristin is  ”Daily defying what it means to be a divorced-Christian-liberal-remarried-Midwestern-mommy-writer.”

________________________

How did you come up with the idea for Flock?

I’ve been a soulcare provider and community builder for many, many years. Two years ago we moved to Copenhagen, Denmark, and a consistent community base has been hard to come by. I miss having a physical soultribe to turn to, and in its absence I am grateful for the online tribe that has formed around me while I lived abroad. I am fan of Ecourses, but wanted something that was more ongoing, something where we could all sink a little deeper into relationship with others. So I decided to try forming an online soultribe.

Flock has several components. Did they all come to you at once, or did the idea begin as a specific component and then grew from there?

Everything I offer in the Flock has emerged organically from topics and practices that have been in embryo at Magpie Girl. I wanted to start with the High Holy Days, to provide an anchoring rhythm to our seasons. The Ask an Expert feature emerged out of the guest interviews I’d been organizing at Magpie Girl. The rites and rituals in Priestessy Things are part of the work I’ve done ever since my days as the Urban Abbess. And the Read-a-Longs…well, who amongst us doesn’t have a stack of books they’d like to talk about with their friends? You know that saying, “Nothing is ever wasted”? I’m finally seeing the truth of that as my seemingly random blogging matures into what is now being offered at Flock. Someone recently said to me, “At Magpie Girl, you feed us great stuff, but the Flock is where the real meat and potatoes happen.”

You have been blogging and interacting with readers for a long time. Are you able to pick up on certain questions and needs that lots of people seem to have? How did those themes translate to the creation of Flock?

Oh yes! The more I live in the blogosphere the more I notice recurring themes and questions among the women I read and follow, and who read and follow me. There’s a deep longing for a non-institutionalized expressing of spirituality. There’s also this intuitive need to tell our stories, which I think is intertwined with the outpouring of photography, mixed media art, fabric art, and poetry that is flooding the web. And there is a desire to have withmates on the journey. Perhaps that is the deepest felt need of all. I truly feel that is why the Flock has come into being.

Language around spirituality can be so confining, and can easily box us in. Was it difficult to find the right way to talk and write about what Flock is?

Flock is a pretty unique approach and concept, so we are letting the language around it develop as we go. I’m guessing that our description of Flock will remain fluid and evolve as we live out a life together. That’s why I didn’t include a tagline in the header. Right now we are using “soulcare spa” because it expresses nurture. And the “nesting place” concept is because so many of my Magpie Girl readers kept expressing the need to find a place to call home. Hospitality and a generous spirit are dominate values for me, and that’s what “soulcare” and “nesting” communicate to me.

Why do you believe things like rituals and creativity are integral to spirituality?

Mmmm. I couldn’t get by without rituals! To me, rituals access an un-seeable reality and make it physical, tangible.This helps us process and experience numinous things in a more full-bodied way. I also think rituals help us embed positive messages into our be-ings. They integrate important truths about ourselves and our living into our bodies and minds.

Creativity, to me, is at the heart of the Divine. In the Jewish and Christian tradition, it is the first thing we learn about God: “In the beginning, God created…” When we access our creative selves, we touch the Divine within us and reach out to the Divine beyond us. It’s also a HUGE part of accessing the Feminine Divine, or womanly aspects of God, because birth and procreation is so heavily weighted towards the feminine. (Plus being creative is fun. Don’t you think? “Why so serious?” I like fun!)

Why do you think people end up leaving churches/more organized forms of religion?

Often it is because they cannot be their fullest, truest selves within an organization that demands acquiescence to a creed. It’s hard to sign on 100 percent to someone else’s charter for living. In many organized religions there is a lot of assessing one’s “walk” and judging one’s practices. That’s hard to live under. And if you disagree with your pastor or small group leader, you have to remain silent or your belonging is jeopardized. If you cannot live your most open, truest self, you do damage to your soul. Some organized religious bodies avoid this. But it can be very hard to find.

Is Flock very flexible and customizable? What if a person doesn’t have lots of time, or doesn’t know for sure what they believe about God, or doesn’t see themselves as particularly creative?

Flock is very flexible in regards to time. There are several practices—and even variations on each practice—each month. There’s no pressure to do all of them. Think of yourself as a kid in a candy shop. You get to choose! You can stop by every day and visit in the chat rooms, read an article, listen to a podcast, or write about some concept you are chewing on. Or you could just visit on the weekends and get some nurture for the week ahead.

Some of the things we offer do involve the concept of God in a general way. And we also work with the idea of spirituality in general, and with the idea of connecting with the power of the Universe, or the created Order. And there is no guilt-based teaching or “bad sinner” ideology.

I love art-based spiritual practices, and there will be quite a bit of that in the Flock. But you don’t have to be an artist, or even be particularly creative to get involved. Honest.

You say Flock is “dedicated to finding a spirituality that fits.” What is your philosophy on this, and why is helping others in this area so important to you?

I spent a lot of years wearing religious clothes that didn’t really fit me. I kept trying to hitch them up with a belt, squeeze into them sideways, or hold them together with safety pins. But ultimately, I realized I had outgrown some of them, and that my style had also changed. Deconstructing my religious and spiritual beliefs was a challenging, brave, and sometimes scary task.

I see a lot of people (men and women) doing that same deconstruction process. Often they get stuck at the deconstruction stage and never manage to reconstruct something that suits them better.They remain hungry for some sort of spiritual practice, disillusioned and discouraged. I think that if we as ministers, spiritual directors, and soulcare providers are going to encourage people to think creatively about their beliefs, and possibly deconstruct them, then we are responsible for helping people reconstruct them as well. I have a passion for walking with the people who are in that process. It really stirs my soul.

The publishing and writing schedule for Magpie Girl and Flock…as scribbled out during the kid’s gospel choir rehearsal last night. (Work where you can.)

I am on pins and needles waiting for my designer to upload the finalized version of our new endeavor – Flock with Magpie Girl. Flock is “a nesting place for restless souls” with lots of courses for spiritual nurture, all offered at one monthly price. Think of it as a spa for your soul! The bonus to this method is that it creates an on-going place for a soultribe to gather, and it allows for the kind of teaching-learning process I so adore. We can really fill up the giant pool of wisdom with the Flock!

I like knowing how artists and other creative people work. If you are intrigued by that too, here’s a peek into the process of starting our Flock.

Initially Flock started out as an idea for two Ecourses. But as I worked through 31 Days to A Better Blog and started on the elevator pitches for my Ecourses, I realized what I really wanted was an ongoing on-line soultribe. I’d already done some vocational work with my amazing life coach, Jena Strong, and knew that community building was a skill I’d been practicing for a long time. The short-term nature of Ecourses wouldn’t scratch my community building itch. Since reading Chris Guillebeau’s Art + Money, I had been thinking about opening a membership site. But I had allowed  the outside voices of Conventional Wisdom and Fear to negate my intuitive pull towards that option. As I embraced the membership site as a viable choice, things started moving into place.

Jennifer McGuiggan helped me move through the wheel of work, which made me realize I needed a partner to get through the bottom half of the wheel – the execution half. So I scraped my money together and hired Neil Sittler of Stickflower Design to help me get a website ready. This was important because my work with Jena had already shown me that “beauty” was high on my list of guiding values, and that if I didn’t have a esthetically pleasing site, I wouldn’t be able to tap into the right energy to sustain a long-term project such as an online soulcare community.

While Neil worked on the site, soulsisters Lisa Alexander and Jamie Ridler coached me on values-based pricing, so that I would not consider my pattern of chronically under-charging. I was still struggling with setting a price that truly reflected the value of my work, when Jen Lemen suggested I do muscle testing to connect with my inner wisdom on the matter. After a truly amazing round of muscle testing with my daughter Eden, I finally came to a place of  confidence with my pricing choices.

I also decided to face my fear of asking for help so I asked a few soulcare providers I know and adore to come on board as expert advisers for Flock. And while I cannot announce who quite yet, I’m happy to say that my dream team of (therapist, life coach, and dream analyst and more) is starting to come together for our “Ask the Experts” column.

Finally, yesterday I sat down and wrote out a schedule of what I’m going to be posting each day both at Magpie Girl and at Flock, and what day I’d have to write it in order to get it posted professionally, on time, and well-edited. Because my health is a bit of a crap shoot, I included a day to write “stockpiled” posts so I have something to keep the goodness flowing when chronic pain sets me back for awhile.

Now I’m just waiting for the last odds and ends to get done on the website, and before Christmas we will have sign ups ready for our New Year’s launch! (Join my mailing list for a grand opening discount.)

As I write this post I realize once again how blessed I am to have this (almost entirely virtual) community around me. Those mentioned here, and others as well, helped me get past my sticking points and uncover the “ah ha” moments I needed to get through this process. I’m also struck by how Jen Lemen’s advice to “write to the tribe you’re starting to form”; and my mentor Ed Cook’s adage “you always preach the sermons you need to hear,” have both been proven true. All of the links embeded in this story were written by myself, or by Magpie Girl guests,  because I needed to hear them, and so did my tribe. Now I can see them as the work The Muse and The Universe were doing to get us where we need to be — that is,  together.

So thanks you so much, dear Magpie Girl reader, for being a part of this process. Your comments and visits have encouraged me more than I can say. I cannot wait until we are all gathered together in our Flock! Thanks for being here.

Much Warmth,

Rachelle