After attending Quattro’s Entrepreneur’s College, I feel it’s time to take on groups that challenge my speaking skills. I didn’t get the chance to do my presentation up in front of Gary de Rodriguez’s Powerful Presentations class and feel the need to keep sharpening the skills he so graciously shared with us.
I am also taking some time off of a networking group I have helped nurture and grow over the past year. Right before the college I realized I had outgrown it…I hope that doesn’t sound pompous or arrogant. Instead it feels like it isn’t meeting my networking needs any more and that I need something more challenging. Quite often we all go through contemplation periods in our lives. This being a Mercury Retrograde cycle right now offers me the best chance to sit down and reevaluate it’s worth in my life with the best possible chances of making a balanced, objective decision about whether I should continue on it with or not.
April 30, 2009
I had the great, good fortune the morning of April 30th to spend a brief time at breakfast with Quattro teacher Gary de Rodriguez. He was staring, lost in thought, out the window at the vast sea of boats and masts docked just outside the Kona Kai hotel in San Diego (where the college is) and I went over to say Hi and how much I enjoyed his classes when he invited me to sit down.
Though we only spent about 10 minutes talking, it was great to just converse outside class about little things here and there…the kundalini of the planet, where we each were when Kennedy was assasinated, further training for Quattro reps in the Los Angeles area. He expressed a desire to train us in such a way that we “don’t even mention sales during our presentations”, making them all about the service Quattro provides and how important it is to the future of small business owners and entrepreneurs everywhere. It was a great, pleasant start to the morning I will keep among the best memories of our time here at the college.
I learned so much as a student in his class at the Quattro inagural College. The transformations I saw in his Powerful Presentations class among my husband, the students I worked with and the ones who gave their talks at the end of the class were amazing. It was during that 20 hours of instruction with him that I felt us as a community at the Quattro College really bond to each other. Having that brief time to talk at breakfast during the college, too, was a joy and a rare moment. I can’t wait for him to come to L.A. to give us more instruction. I will be there, whatever it takes!
Evolution means sometimes taking risk. Anything worth obtaining is worth paying the price for. Do you believe this? If you do, your possibilities in life widen.
The next step in business evolution for me, I believe, is to become a better salesperson. To learn more about how to sell my products and myself, to learn more about how the world of business works, and especially about who is not only surviving, but thriving in this downturned economy and more importantly WHY they are thriving. Even before the economy turned, about a year, year and a half ago, I realized that jewelry and cell phone purse retail sales were not going to cut it in bringing in enough money for me. I followed what the Universe seemed to be guiding me to do, and that was website design. When the economy killed my retail sales half a year later, it began bringing me more opportunities for expanding my website design clientele and so I went back to school to get some more education in the Adobe CS3 suite. But that was only the beginning of my evolutionary journey.
Now, in April 2009, my research into this area has me sitting at the inagural opening ceremonies of a new business college created by Quattro University. This is a large, financial chance we are taking, but in a sense it was also a no-brainer. With our 401ks hemmoraging money every month, they no longer served our purpose where they were. They are better invested into sharpening our business and entrepreneural skills. Remember, give a man a fish (or a job) and you’ll sustain them for a time. Teach them to fish (or run a business as an entrepreneur) and they will not only feed themselves, but they will be able to adapt and adopt to changes in the economy. And, as Quattro teaches, they will be able to “pay it forward” so everyone around them who are willing to listen will also benefit.
I put out this story to you as a word of advice about what you put out on the internet…
An anonymous stalker from my past showed up at the beginning of this year. If you don’t think it’s scary when you have been successfully hiding from someone for the last 27 years who tried to ruin your life, you are in for a shock when it happens to you.
Perhaps this should go under the “Pearls of Wisdom” category? I will find another, more pointed story one day that perhaps might emphasize the point better and do that.
Does that make me a weird person that I had a stalker? No, not really. EVERYONE has had someone in their life they would rather left the planet…we just don’t have the Star Trek transporter technology yet to accomplish such a feat. I look at it as a part of life…we all have a vulnerable point in our lives into which things and people come that are unwelcome, and one day we stand up to that, stop running and tell them, “I am not afraid of you anymore.”. That has been my most satisfying, recent experience this year and it was AWESOME.
I have been told I am a strong woman…one not afraid to speak her mind. Perhaps the latter is true and always has been, but I did not become a strong woman until I faced down that man. I just wish every woman could learn that lesson in her lifetime.
More power to you who do and my prayers to those yet to.
When the internet was first conceived of by the U.S. Naval Department in the 1960s, I am sure they never thought it would become such an important tool for advertising businesses in less than 50 years. It has truly become a tool of the common people, shaped by their needs and to their needs as no other government project or human tool ever conceived of by man
As much as we decry advertising on the ‘net…the banners that pop up unwanted on our screens, the spam ads that invade our electronic mailboxes and the “free” websites and tools that come with the price of plastering their ads on your monitor, we continue to use it, ignoring their barrage and pushing ever forward in making it an experience as good as having your friends and contacts in your living room.
When I was a child in the 1960s, I was so starved for friends, I cried when the one or two in the neighborhood moved away. My parents had settled down in a housing suburb of San Mateo that had been built in 1946 for the World War II vets that came home, so there were very, very few people at all under 40 years of age. I learned quickly that friends who moved away were not as devoted to keeping in touch by phone or letter.
I think that’s why my generation was determined to draw it’s wayward friends and family back together through the invisible strings of the internet’s connections.
Born out of this came a strengthening of the yearnings to gather in social groups on the ‘net. We saw how easy it was to do now via email, and then we created groups on Yahoo, MSN and Google. We found we could gather together in one room and hold virtual parties without worry of physical distance or time of day or night. Chat Rooms came next, hosted by these “big three” internet giants, and Instant Messaging appeared soon after.
While the Big Three were puzzling out what was the next step in evolution, MySpace snuck onto the scene and was quickly claimed as the territory of the younger generation. It has the draw of new and upcoming music bands, and once you staked a claim, you could add your thoughts, photos, games and tell everyone when you were in a happy or foul mood. We were now closer to that perfect social networking environment, but we were quite there yet.
YouTube came then…a way to get your video out there, no matter what the subject or how weird your taste. Blogging was born, it’s infancy seen in the MySpaces out there.
People were also taking an old standard, the message board Forums, and updating them every time a new evolutionary tool came out. When they started out, they didn’t have the ability to host graphics, show our photo albums as slide shows, run YouTube videos or house chat rooms, but now they do all that and sometimes more. Still, it wasn’t enough.
The Big Three may have been actively trying to figure out what was the new trend, or how to capitalize on the next big idea, but while they were to all outward appearances, asleep at the switch, they got sideswiped and passed up by the amazing concepts of YouTube and Blogging. Sure, they quickly threw together blogging capability on their websites, but they were (and in the case of Yahoo, still are) pathetically lame, looking like they were slapped on as a last-minute edition, which is exactly what they were.
Here is a fact to make you wake up, if you think all of this high-speed internet evolution is a passing trend; the top three social networks (Facebook, Twitter & LinkedIn) get more traffic than Google, Yahoo and MSN combined. Suddenly the Big Three were the Behind the Times Three, run by those who had started and pioneered the internet’s evolution. Blogs and YouTube are run by the next generation and are what is called, “Social Networking 2.0″.
So, what is “Social Networking 2.0″? Why should you know and why should you get involved in it if you want to increase your business and social contacts? Read on when we post the next part very soon…
