Sweetie! – Page 3

Do You Know What Is Profitable for Your Life?

“What do you do for a living?” is a very different question than “What do you do for a life?” Personally I didn’t want the two to be in separate responses. Working for a living is required in my non-trust funded existence. My truth is I love to earn my living and I am willing to do what it takes to enjoy my life.

That didn’t happen in one season.

For years I subscribed to the concept of “you have to be a professional something, after all you did high school, college, graduate school and now “wallah” you’re xzy…which in my case was an educator, a specialist for children and adults with giftedness, behavior disorders, learning disabilities and cultural difference. Who knew that was the perfect preparation for working with creatives and families in business?

But back to the story.

The Bible says that all things are permissible, but not all things are profitable in our lives.

That caused me to pause and really return to the words over and over again in my life. Profitability matters to me. When I worked with young minds and hearts, I knew that they would not profit from activities that would not encourage, edify, and empower them to be strong thinkers. The same is true in my own life. It was an easy connection.

However, I didn’t understand for a long time that profitability has to be defined in all areas of your life. It turns out that success can kill you just as fast as starvation. Ask any of the families who have done the work to have a successful business and outcome. Time management, mindset management, food and fuel management, relationship management and the plain old work doesn’t get easier with success, in fact it gets more encompassing. Intentionality matters if you’re going to thrive as a work from home family or entrepreneur.

This is the one and only life you are spending, do you know what you are buying with your time? Your energy? Your presence? Your effort?

What actually makes the life you want to live happen? That’s the journey we’re on, and actively pursuing. Why not take some time, just a few moments, and begin a list somewhere of the life you want to live. A few of our notes were:

We want to live…

As a family who is close in relationships and enjoys one another’s company

Debt free and able to support other’s needs when hard times come

As a family in integrity with our belief in God, in our work with others, and with intentional focused processes

As individuals who mature their God given gifts and shares them with others

As a couple who relishes being married to the other and appreciates the privilege this life is.

What are some of your base desires in your life? The real stuff, the meat of who you want to be? Have you thought about that lately?

Working as a Family from Home.

Our Ozarks Life

Do you dream of working from home? Has a season come to your life that made it required or perhaps more advantageous to do so? When we began a work from home family it was not by choice. My daughter was in second grade as a dyslexic child with giftedness, and not thriving, I had two parents with cancer, and Feller was about to head out to another deployment with the DoD overseas. He volunteered. (stay home with four children, a wife, and sick parents or go overseas and play war ) It wasn’t a hard choice to make as a couple, for we knew that his time overseas would allow our family to have transitional income while I came home to homeschool our daughter, continue to build our blended family closer, and to focus on caring for our extended money.

Was our plan inclusive of a financial plan that made sense? No! We actually knew the exact day we’d go bankrupt if we failed to enact the plan. It wasn’t a pretty plan, we were barely paying bills with a full time teaching position, a part time direct sales position, four children, two dogs and a partridge in a pear tree. Our recent blended marriage meant that we had two start over financial realities from previous lives to overcome, four children between us, and a heap of hope, but no money.

This season many are being forced to change as we were. Jobs end. Illness brings you home. Fear of illness changes what you are willing to do, or be. In this series, we’ll share the information that worked for us, that has worked with many of the families we know and how to manage the different areas of your life as a work-from-home family.

We’re eighteen years into working from home with one business that has grown to three focused areas of our business. This season we’ve brought Feller home to take on a role as his job ended in Covid times. We didn’t see that coming, for his industry is resilient in hard seasons, but here we are. Oh and in the middle of it all, we’ve made the choice to lease out our home and move to a dream we’ve had a long time. A mini-farm and creative center for our business to be onsite in the NE Corner of Oklahoma near Bentonville, Arkansas, Joplin, Missouri, Tulsa, Oklahoma and most of all, our families. Did I mention the mini-farm, the Redbird Cottage Farm is a down to the studs level renovation job?

Join us on this adventure? We’ll be glad to see you here!

~ Sweetie

The Season is Changing, Fall is Here!

Uncategorized

Are you facing many changes in your business and family this year? This back to school season brings so many changes to usual back-to-school practices. Are you a homeschooler? Are you a public schooler now schooling at home? This season has many families in business and creatives scrambling for new ideas on how to make the schedule work. Everything from shared bandwidth requirements that are now strained if online school programs need children engaged to how to supervise and work with students while getting the business and work at home needs managed are a question for many. Sweetie has had more calls from state departments, districts and local teachers and families this six week’s than she could have imagined. What a privilege to help make needed changes so children can learn.

Online personal and professional training matters. We’re here to serve your needs whether it be WordPress support, how to go online LIVE or in pre-recorded sessions, how to use current tools such as Blackboard, Zoom, Google Classroom, or Camtasia. We’re here to help you with lesson plan development, adaptive services at home, and how to manage your business while children and teens may be schooling at home.

Everything Easier at home, at school, and online are being brought forward more rapidly for the needs of our clients and local area. We’re happy to support your needs as well as the needs of our clients.

Families in business are facing heavy stresses in Covid times. For some businesses, like our own, we’ve retooled to provide more online support, more through the screens educational training and professional development as clients found a need for more online services in their business. Others have had to change their programming, for no longer can large farm events happen as easily with social distancing and for many, this meant ingenuity and creative strategy to replace income earners were needed. Yet others opened online stores for the first time, selling their wares and services virtually.

Everything Easier Online is hands on help to support these processes as well as services such as social media content support, graphics, and media production. We’re proud of the successes of our clients such as Crescent Dragonwagon who, along with her spouse, cyber expert Mark Graff, chose to go online during Covid lockdown to provide a reading hour for families of Crescent’s, and her mother Charlotte Zolotow’s award winning children’s books. That consistent presence for over one hundred days online brought increased awareness of her offerings, her workshops and her book sales, though no marketing was enacted during the truly offered for stress release reading hour. Our clients buy and seek services from who they know, reading aloud the stories encouraged family time, relaxing experiences together, and shared experiences as an audience. What more can you ask during Covid times? An encouraging, peace filled moment in the middle of the storm.

We’re proud of our local businesses in the Ozarks who have offered online services for the first time from farms who were previously wholesale to the retail distribution centers and restaurants only, who re-tooled to offer fresh produce of high quality to the local families through online ordering and distanced pickups. What a gift to areas where store supplies were lacking or several weeks and food would have gone bad, crops wasted, without innovation. We salute the thinking of how to support families, how to engage excellence with service and safety all day long.

We’re proud for the authors, speakers, and creatives who took this time to learn more online skills and enacted coursework, presentations and for fun activities to re-tool how they work, how they provide services and offerings , and preserve their ability to add such high value to others through sharing their art, their music, and their lessons online. What a gift to families at home without the ability to safely travel, or return to their usual weekly activities.

This season is different for all of us. However we are seeing the every day heroes make the best of a hard season and try new things. Innovation is amplifying and expanding how these families and individuals in business survive and thrive and we celebrate the spirit of citizens who simply get the job done.