Monday Motivation: Starting a Day with Vitamin O and Vitamin F
This is a perfect blog to repost three years after it was written because it still remains so true. I hope it inspires you today to get some of the “right vitamins” for your own life.
Inspiration, Monday Motivation, Love on this Columbus Day for Women and Women Entrepreneurs
Ever since leaving the soft green hues of Sanibel Island’s warm waters two weeks ago where swimming, kayaking and long walks on the beach with my family, enveloped me in fun and fitness, I have missed feeling so healthy, whole and happy when outdoors in the elements.
Outdoors is where I want to reside as often as I can to feel the wind on my face, and even my hairless noggin, where I’ve come to accept my health condition of alopecia. If anything the struggles of the past year accepting the loss of all my hair, stripping me to my emotional and physical core and altering my identity, I’ve refocused a majority of my life on what brings me everyday joy – joy I can control.
As the cool 55 degree morning with brisk wind greeted me…
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Friday Feelings: Idea Generation For Anything
Friday Feelings, Inspiration for Women Entrepreneurs, Women Business Owners, Small Businesses
Where do creative ideas come from? Sometimes I wonder how Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein came up with products, theories, and inventions. Was it pure intellect or imagination? Was it something that “illuminated” them – perhaps an ‘aha’ moment of sorts that later turned into masterworks after hard work, turmoil, and tests?
As I rode my bike today, along the once all-green covered path, I noticed how the green changed to varying shades of gold, orange, crimson, brown, and even dark purple. One particular tall weed with its slightly bent tip with hanging, shaggy, brown, feather-like leaves caught my eye and sparked my own imagination. Off my bike I went to put the hair-like leaves where my bangs once were before I lost my hair to alopecia. It became an imaginary “shag wig” and off I rode looking for other leaves or weeds to add to my new “natural wig collection.”
As I pedaled, I scoured the foliage and fauna next to the path for different shades of natural material that could become different colored wigs. I wasn’t serious but rather on an art adventure to entertain my mind on a dreary bike day. There were varying shades of “blonde” – gold and bright yellow leaves, and “red” – more like crimson than orange hair that people have, and even “white” puffs of some type of smaller weed, I had to kneel on the ground to put up to my forehead in case anyone wanted to buy a wig for their golden years.
I delighted in the prospect of sharing my funny wig idea with my Facebook friends who have been stellar at supporting me through my bald stage in life. Would they think I lost my mind? Would they take my new wig business seriously or would they humor me with some likes, laughter, and crying emjois? It ended up being a combination of responses which brought me a smile to my face.
The lesson for anyone reading this today is to allow yourself to play sometimes with ideas that make you see the world in a different way. It could be using your right-brain thinking instead of your left-brain thinking for once. It might remind you what it was like to be a kid searching for cool things on an adventure making you light in spirit. It could even spark a business idea – you never know. The lesson is to not take life so seriously, play, have fun, experiment, envision, think differently, and enjoy.
It’s Columbus Day Weekend so venture out into your community on your fun adventure that might make you a more creative thinker.
Wednesday Wisdom: Planning for Loss – A Lesson in Business and Life from Hurricane Ian
Wednesday Wisdom, Inspiration, Motivation for Women Entrepreneurs, Small Business Owners
There have been few times in my life when the statement, “I’ve lost everything” came from my lips. We all go through life hoping and praying for fate to be kind. Sometimes we have some control over outcomes and other times we don’t. It is that simple.
For the past 25 years, my husband, sons and I have vacationed on the most beautiful island in the world, Sanibel Island, Florida. We discovered it on a short trip across the Sunshine State to meet my cousin who was living near it at the time. It was one of those random day trips with our 3 and 6 year old sons in tow hoping to show them another sandy beach to pick seashells and jump in the warm waters. Little did we know on that fateful trip, Sanibel would grab our hearts and return us there annually. The walls of my house are proof of our love with images of it all over; especially our September 29, 2019 trip where my husband and I renewed our vows on her white shores with our grown sons as our witnesses.
By now you know that Hurricane Ian has devastated this tropical paradise we called home. A profound sense of sadness at the loss of something so beautiful is hard to explain. A woman I follow on Facebook keeps Island fans like us updated yearlong with morning videos, sunsets, local news, and the serenity of the beaches almost every day until a few days ago when all she wrote in her post was, “I’ve lost everything.”
Years ago at the annual WISE Conference put on by Syracuse University, one of my business friends got up on stage and spoke of losing everything she had with her once popular national business, announcing that she declared bankruptcy. She wasn’t scared to share the news or embarrassed by it, she simply wanted to tell her story so other women wouldn’t repeat her mistakes. I’ve never been more proud of a business person than her. Years later she relocated to Florida where she died of cancer with her humor, pride, and spirit intact.
As women entrepreneurs we can’t assume the blue sky above us will always be there and that our bountiful bank account will remain high, because one day like so many businesses that are struck with fires, floods, and storms, they might come our way. As simple as the thought of insurance, back up plans, and emergency planning might seem, do we have what we really need in case something strikes us one Thursday morning and when we overcome it, will we share it with others so one day they won’t have such a hard time?
Today’s Wednesday Wisdom is meant to have you double check your back up business plans, insurances, staffing, credit lines, vendors, and other forms of security in case something unexpected occurs to you, your property, or your community. We don’t want to think bad thoughts, but honestly we must. Being a worst-case scenario planner is much better than other potential scenarios. Buck up and get an action plan in place if you don’t have one so you are as prepared as you can be.
The skies are already blue over Sanibel Island, but the businesses and homes demolished by an unexpected force of nature, will remain in the dark for a long time. The only way back up, is through, for them and hopefully not for those of us fortunate enough to pay attention and have substantial plans in place and good fate on our sides.
Dill or Sweet? It’s Pickleball Time
Friday Feelings, Inspiration, Women in Sports, Female Athletes, Women Entrepreneurs
On a cool early fall evening I met a friend with an addiction (her words, not mine) to Pickleball. I didn’t have to choose between a dill or sweet pickleball, just needed to show up in relaxed pants, tennis shoes, and a comfortable top to move around in. In fact, the pickleball was more like a wiffleball, yellow with holes in it, lighter than a tennis ball and not as bouncy.
The fact that LeBron James with two other NBA stars had just purchased a Major League Pickleball (MLP) expansion franchise, as the competition grows from 12 to 16 teams, made trying Pickleball an interesting prospect. MLP founder Steve Kuhn stated, “Pickleball is the fastest growing sport in the country and our goal is to reach 40 million pickleball players by 2030.” As of 2021, 4.8 million Americans now play the sport.
What you haven’t heard about this sport yet? It started in 1965 when two dads named Joel Pritchard and Bill Bell had bored families at home so they used an old badminton court, spare ping pong paddles, and a wiffle ball to create a game. Two years later Pritchard constructed the first pickleball court in his backyard. The game gained steam in the Pacific Northwest where the men lived and here it is today as the fastest growing sport.
As a long time tennis player, I felt pretty comfortable trying it out. The main adjustments were the shorter racket with its harder surface (no strings) and lack of a bounce from the balls opposed to tennis balls. The courts are shorter and thinner than tennis courts. Typically every court is taken where we played, but we got there early enough to snag a court and by the end of the night we were using two courts.
Pickleball is FUN! I liken it to a cross between ping pong and tennis with the speed and volleying of ping pong with the set up like tennis. It is a very social sport since players talk through the game, often times giving compliments for good shots – or maybe they were being nice to me on my first attempt. Because people wait for courts to open, if there is a twosome playing, they’ll invite another twosome to join them since the game is more fun with four players. So in the course of the evening, I met and played with five other new people besides my friend. Most of them were two-week old beginners of the game, and admitted to be addicted like my friend Kathleen who brought me there.
My Fitbit told me I burned 900 calories during the multiple match sets, and I wasn’t sore. My cheeks were pink from the cool air, my body warm, and my spirit glowing like the yellow balls and setting sun which eventually kicked us off the courts. Could we play longer, sure could, because it is addictive, but at last all good things come to an end sometime.
I highly recommend finding out more about the sport. The paddles are around $60. Courts are being established as the game grows, but my friend plays it sometimes in her driveway with a portable net. It is affordable, fun, social, and calorie-burning. What more could you ask for in a new sport to try?
Ode to Sanibel Island – We Love You
We aren’t the first family, or the last, to assign the Sanibel Captiva Causeway Bridge as our “happy lane.” For 25 years driving up and down the expansive white bridge onto little isles of land dotted with a few palm trees, and then up again and down some more bridge until the car landed on our fantasy island, was our favorite destination. Mr. Rourke wasn’t on the Island to greet us with a Pina Colada but we soon found one at our favorite eatery the Fish House, where the frothy drink accompanied a Grouper Ruben.
I can still see the boys with their dark bangs adorning their cherub faces as we slurped milkshakes at the Island Cow during our first visit followed by the escapade of finding seashells in a Sanibel Stoop form. As the palm trees billowed over a couple decades, the boys grew as tall and thin as them, landing one of them at 6’4” tall. Hunting for seashells eventually turned into fishing expeditions with numerous captains with our favorite being Captain Rin Newmeyer, a native Sanibel man, who we still talk about today.
Every year whether the boys were in school or college, we coordinated our family vacation to this breathtaking paradise. Our last visit together as family of four was today, September 29, 2019 to celebrate my husband and I’s 30th wedding anniversary on the white shores of the green sea. Married originally in a formal Catholic church was stunning and dutiful, but celebrating 3-decades of love with our two sons as our witness on a balmy, warm September night where we all loved to go was heaven sent.
Our boys took us to eat at Casa Ybel’s Thistle Lodge, our first long time rental home, as we shared our life- long Sanibel memories with the boys who could now drink real cocktails. After dinner, in the moonlight, we rode to Capitiva Island to a house we rented for the week leaving dear Sanibel behind. This special house, with the gulf and a pool and just the four of us together again, is where we danced and swam until midnight under the stars with it most likely being the last time our unit of four would be together alone, since the boys had plans to get engaged the following year.
It’s impossible to capture the memories we made, the laughter we shared, the sunsets we witnessed together as we grew as a family on the white beaches and warm salty water. All I can say today, on my 33rd Wedding Anniversary, is how grateful I am to have renewed my wedding vows on the island that became so dear and meaningful to my family.
We hope and pray it can recover after yesterday’s catastrophic hurricane, not only for our family to return some day with grandchildren in tow, but for the thousands of people who call Sanibel Island their home too.
Wednesday Wisdom: Contract Eagle Eyes
Wednesday Wisdom, Inspiration, Women Entrepreneurs, Female Business Owners, Small Businesses
The sticker shock was real. It was in black and white on the proposal needing a signature. There must be something out of whack I thought to myself as I re-read the agreement over again. Not only was the pricing four times the cost I remembered, but there was no exception for an event cancellation, which was totally unheard of a decade ago, and Pre-Covid. Shaking my head, I thought I’ve been out of the request for proposal game for awhile using mostly familiar venues, vendors, and friends of my longtime business.
Not being satisfied with the high cost, I decided to search for more bids to see if the price shock was justified or some sense of price gauging since the pandemic hurt the event industry. Not only did past clients demand multiple bids and options for vendor selection when it came to weddings or special events, but comparing prices, offerings, and reviews before signing a legal document made sound financial and management sense.
I drive fast, talk fast, and typical make quick decisions but when it comes to financial contracts, I move slow ensuring all the i’s are dotted and t’s crossed before proceeding. Slowing down sometimes when it comes to financial decision is a wise choice, especially in today’s world when everything has risen in price. We must ensure the increase in prices are warranted and not just an easy response for a business to capitalize. As women entrepreneurs, we understand this situation walking the fine line between pricing, profit margins, loss, and signing clients.
Today’s Wednesday Wisdom might motivate you to reconsider your pricing policy Post-covid. Are you in line with competitors and the marketplace today? Are you priced too low or too high? Are you gaining or losing business based on pricing and contract verbiage? Have you paid enough attention to this area of your business lately? If not, it might be time to do so.There are many factors that go into pricing make sure you are where you need to be.
In the end, we’ll choose the right vendor for this event based on their reputation, reviews, ease of working with us, contract clauses and pricing. It is a “package” deal when it comes to securing vendors in 2022.
Monday Motivation: A Reason to Shed
Monday Motivation, Monday Mood for Women Entrepreneurs, Female Business Owners, Small Businesses
Two of the views out my desk window are a red horse barn with white fence for riding lessons and tall corn stalks in an active farmer’s field to feed cows in the winter. After 30 years of living in our abode, I know when harvest time is approaching by the heavy sounds of the tractors coming up the road turning into the corn field outside the window. As they cut the first row of corn, golden stalk debris is shredded and lifted into the air like harvest confetti landing on our driveway as if a celebration of the season is in session.
Since it was Monday, I started out my work week biking 20-miles to set an aggressive tone of work for the week. As I biked amidst a canopy of blonde leaves, once green, trees were shedding them and they landed between my fingers, on my bald head, and actually in my mouth. Not one to chew on rusty leaves; I smiled and spit it out wondering what the odds were of that happening again, and then I proceeded biking over and crushing the red and orange leaves on the bike path.
It’s been 3 years since I shed all my hair to alopecia which halted my free-wheeling entrepreneurial spirit to some degree. Anyone with alopecia or cancer chemotherapy understands how devastating shedding one’s glorious crown can be. But just like the innocent corn stalks in the field and the golden-haired leaves on the trees, we shed. Sometimes we shed hair or pounds. Sometimes, we get rid of our own unwanted debris in terms of mental sadness, negativity, or anxiety, and as entrepreneurs we shed staff, unsold products, decades-old files, and packed drawers of useless marketing materials, now obsolete. Sometimes it feels good to shed in business. Reducing the clutter, opens up space we can use for something else.
As the farmers reopen their land space again, getting rid of aged produce, they’ll reseed and fertilize it for the next new grain to plant and eventually harvest. Trees shed their leaves so they aren’t ruined when winter snow weighs them down. If we could be farmers, turning that insight of harvest into golden nuggets of wisdom, wouldn’t we admit that we all need to shed at times in order to replant, regrow, and re-harvest so we can have more work abundance in the future? What can you “shed” today mentally, physically, or spiritually, that will help you open space for your next level of growth?
Let your Monday Mood be one of shedding so you can plant and harvest more success and goodness in your corner of the world.
Believe the Sky is the Limit – Literally
Thursday Thoughts, Motivation, Inspiration For Women Entrepreneurs, Female Business Owners, Women in Sports, Female Athletes
As I drove to the large range, memories of my father and I standing behind my Grandfather’s house arose. Being the oldest child to a father who loved sports and hunting, it made perfect sense I was going to be the first one to learn how to hunt pheasant. At the ripe age of ten, I don’t remember if it was my idea or my father’s to take me shooting but there we were one day. All I remembered from the experience was the gun hurting my shoulder when it went off. I’ll give that one up for being young.
Fast forward forty years later as I made my way to join two expert female trap shooters and two female friends for another “shot” at a gun sport. Mixing up the meaning of the words trap shooting with skeet shooting was beginner’s verbiage and corrected as soon as we arrived at the Bridgeport Gun Club ready for the lesson. Trap shooting entailed just one projectile coming out of the “house” at different angles whereas skeet shooting has two projectiles crisscrossing in the air where you try to shoot both. Getting to know the right terminology helps anytime you try a new sport. We were thankful to Shea Beachner and Beth Bellinger, our instructors for the right words.
With vests on that held our bullets, clear plastic glasses to protect our eyes, ear plugs placed in our ears, after listening to our instructors, and guns waiting for us, we walked up to the trap shooting stations with microphones, a black square to rest our gun when we weren’t shooting, looking at the green “house” that would propel our orange clay pigeons into the air for us to hit. We had 25 bullets to shoot 5 shots from 5 different points at the station.
I believe I was the first one to scream excitedly after I took my first shot and the gun pushed back in the pit between my shoulder and chest. Not the same scream that came from my first pheasant hunt which hurt, but one of pleasant surprise. As I extracted the orange cased bullet from the gun, it popped over my shoulder allowing me another gleeful shriek of delight and surprise. I’m not sure seasoned trap shooters are full of such glee, especially if they miss their target, but I was happy to be trying this new sport.
One by one, we took turns shooting, and in the end I hit 7 of 25 pigeons which I thought was pretty good and attributed to my recent archery practice and the great coaching skills of Shea and Beth. In the end, my friends and I agreed we loved trying it and would definitely try it again. We also thought for anyone scared of using guns or have an anti-gun attitude, being taught how to use one safely for target shooting took the stigma away.
So if you are looking for a sport where precision, focus, aim, strength, perfectionism, and adventure merge, find a place to try tap shooting and be careful, because it is addictive.
Wednesday Wisdom: Conquer the Hill
Wednesday Wisdom, Inspiration, Motivation for Women Entrepreneurs, Female Business Owners, Female Athletes
As the hill rose, and rose, up steeper and steeper terrain, thoughts of always wanting to go this high on this road for the past decade couldn’t help but rise too. Often I’d stare at its height, contemplate my energy level, and somehow reason the attempt out. “No way, Tracy, you can’t do that one!” I’d hear myself say. The thought would push to the back of my mind like it typically did, and perhaps my shoulders slumped at bit, in the repetitive decision making process.
With two cups of full strength coffee in my system, five hours past the time I typically exercise, and still on a high from meeting with fifteen fantastic women at an event, I didn’t let that creeping voice in my head speak. “Hush!” Slamming the door on the negative thought and charging straight towards my bike, I hopped on and took off without a thought. Today was the day!
Although my attempt at biking one of the hilliest terrains in my neighborhood, of rolling farmland with tractors coming down the road taking up a lane and a half, was actually so much easier than I imagined. “How can this be,” I asked myself taking in the views? Well the answer arrived as I finished the much anticipated bike ride, “You’ve been riding hills for 2 years, year round, only on another path. You were more than ready to take this hill on.”
And so it is for women entrepreneurs who doubt their ability to climb to a higher level of business success. They stare at ‘the hill’ before them which in business terms is starting a new branch of their career or division in their business, taking on a sizable loan to add staff, or add a new innovative way to help their clients and let it push to the back of their minds ready to launch some other day. There isn’t a problem waiting to take the ride or risk, but I bet you anything you are more ready than you think you are. If you are experienced in business, you probably already know what you need to know, you just don’t trust yourself enough.
Today’s Wednesday Wisdom speaks to the women who, like me, stare at a tempting hill to conquer and put it off until one day they decide “today’s the day” and do it. Do you doubt your knowledge or skills to accomplish something new in your career? Have you taken an inventory of your recent successes in business to prove to yourself you are capable? Do you have energy, and you know the energy I’m talking about, that is dying to burst out and take the risk? If you do, girlfriend, do it.
Just like at the end of my 7-mile extremely hilly, yet easier-than-I-thought bike ride, you might surprise yourself on how unproblematic your next move might actually be. You have a couple choices, stare at the hill and talk yourself out of it, or jump on that bike and pedal your heart out discovering the thrill and ease at which you do it.
Thursday Thought: Risk and Reward Women
Thursday Thought, Inspiration, Motivation for Women Entrepreneurs, Females, Women in Sports
“I’ve always wanted to try it,” an excited woman wrote to me in an email. She went on, “I’m truly looking forward to joining you.”
These were similar statements I heard almost 3-decades ago when I began planning and hosting networking events for women entrepreneurs in Central New York. The budding career of home-based-business and entrepreneurship was just beginning in the mid-1990s as the economy stretched its reaches inside abodes when personal computers were being introduced. I was one of those career-minded women, with two sons under the age of three, leaving a corporate job to be a working mother of two. I didn’t want to leave a career I loved and I didn’t want someone else raising my sons, so entrepreneurship was my choice.
Leaving the four walls of a corporate office, with an assistant outside the door and a boss to guide my workload, was different than sitting in a converted den turned office space with a glass door between my new office and the living room where my sons would watch television if I received a business call so clients didn’t know I was working from home if they heard them talk. It was slightly taboo to work from home in 1995, unlike 2022 post-pandemic, when home offices are all the rage.
I also learned I needed to communicate and share business ups and downs with other women working from home, so I searched out the only women’s business group there was at the time, started in 1991, in Syracuse. It was there that I learned from other women and didn’t feel alone in my entrepreneurial journey. It was there that I felt normal being a risk-taking business woman. Taking over leadership of the group one year after meeting them, I learned a new mission in my life was directing, inviting, and partaking in events with other female entrepreneurs which I continued for nine years until I launched my second company to do exactly that but statewide.
As I look to retire my second company at the end of 2023, my attention has turned to sports and inviting women to try every different sport there is to try once in a lifetime. The statement from the woman above is someone joining me on a skeet shooting teaching session Sunday. Although my focus is changing slightly from women in business, to women in business who want to try sports, my heart mission remains the same, to bring women together to try new things, bond and inspire each other which ultimately leads the way to developing and stretching beyond female expectations in a male-dominated area.
If we can lead our own companies, we can lead our lives into different realms filled with risk and reward too.
Women TIES 