A Week in Twitterville

(Or: everything I know about Twitter I’ve learnt by mistake)

Twitter is another country. It’s a country where everyone is on 24-7. And you’re the newbie immigrant, fresh off the boat. You’ve stumbled on a land where everyone seems to know what they’re doing, everyone has a language you can’t quite understand, there appear to be rules but heaven knows what they are. And boy, it’s noisy, isn’t it? So you blunder around, you mess up, you make a fool of yourself (or was that only me?).

At the time of writing this blog, I have only slightly more than 150 followers and 79 tweets so I am a bare dot on the huge intangible mass that is Twitter. In other words I am not a social networking ingénue. But I am human. So, these are not Twitter rules by any stretch of the imagination. This is my own personal Twitter survival guide pulled together after emerging blinking from a week of total Twitter immersion. I hope you don’t mind if I share. If they make sense to you use them, share them (retweet them!  Get me, picking up the lingo already).

Yesterday I had to give myself a good talking to. It went something like this:

1. You have nothing to prove. No, really. You may one day even have 5,000 followers. But they won’t be hanging on to every word you say. They really won’t. Unless you’re Barack Obama, and last time I looked, you weren’t.

2. The world will go on turning if you don’t tweet for a day or two. So go on relax, prise your fingers from the keyboard. Breathe in, breathe out. Relax.

3. Remember the old days when you came across something interesting, you’d want to share it with your friends and family? How often would that happen – once a day? Two or three times a week? So all of a sudden you’re sharing everything you do from the minute you get up to the minute you go to bed? Why? Oh yes, because you can. Can doesn’t mean should.

4. Twitter is not your confidante. It’s not your best friend. Twitter is a stranger you’ve just met at a cocktail party or business function. Remember that.

5. Only tweet when you feel moved to not because you feel you must. You don’t have to be the most articulate, the most intelligent, the funniest, the most resourceful, insightful, the coolest... you just have to be you.

6. You have a real life. Remember those things attached to your body? They’re called legs. Use them, move them around a bit. Feels good, doesn’t it? Get outside. Speak to real people – you know the ones you can actually physically see. With your eyes.

7. Oh yes, performance anxiety. Just because you have people following you, you don’t have to be perfect. See Rule 1 and 5. Go ahead and get it wrong sometimes, look stupid. Laugh at yourself.

8. It’s not a competition... unless you want your epitaph to be “This woman/man was amazing on Twitter.” Ignore the follower count.

9. Twitter is not for the paranoid – if you are even slightly paranoid, you will become more so. That person who unfollows you, the deafening silence you get when you tweet something you thought was really really hilarious... all that will serve to convince you, you are the outcast at the party, so that’s why I needed rule number 10:

10. Have a Twitter Strategy – okay for the first week or so, you might get so immersed in Twitter you lose all sense of reason (your house doesn’t get cleaned, the kids don’t get fed). But once you wake from it, in my case with a bewildered look on my face (something I like to call my Twitterface), a strategy looks like a sure thing. Decide what you want to use Twitter for – business, social, a mixture of both - and then stick to it.

11. More importantly - have a Twitter Antidote. Twitter can get noisy and exhausting and overwhelming. Do something else. You were you before Twitter happened, you still are. Though perhaps slightly more dishevelled. Would it hurt you to brush your hair once in a while?

12. Tune out the noise. Personally I think it’s only good manners if someone follows you for you to follow them right back. They’re extending their hand in greeting. You wouldn’t refuse to shake someone’s hand in real life – why do it on Twitter? But your Twitter world is going to get real noisy real soon. Enter Tony Mack @TonyMackGD who put aside his own incredulity at my ignorance to kindly tell me how to use Tweetdeck to create my own lists. Thank you Tony!

13. You’re not missing anything important if you don’t read every tweet. If it’s that important it will be on the news.

14. Lighten up. Being sociable all the time is hard work, and more so if you’re pretending to be someone you’re not.  It may feel like another country, but wherever you go, there you will be... even on Twitter.

Best wishes,



Dawn

You're a What?

If I had a pound for every time someone asked me what a business coach is... well, there's a beach in Bali that has my name on it.

I've experimented with several different ways of explaining what I do. And I'm not alone in Coach World. Trying to define the term life or business coach takes up a hefty chunk of Coach Training 101.

The one I'm currently going with (and it does change) is: well, you know how a personal trainer helps get your body in shape? A business coach is a personal trainer for your business, getting your business into the shape you want it to be, trimming the fat, building some muscle, strengthening the backbone.

Defining your product or your services to your customer can be tricky if what you do is something completely new and, as a result, foreign.

So I liked this article and video tweeted by @GuyKawasaki on a technique called Anchor and Twist
Hope you find it useful!

Dawn

What Are You Putting Up With?

If you find any word in this post that's clearly missing a c let me know and I'll give you £5.

My cat likes to sit on my laptop (because it's warm and I sometimes - stupid me -  leave it open). When I tried to prise her off after her latest attempt at disguising herself as a laptop cover, she did what all cats do, she dug her claws in. And  pulled the c off. After some fiddling I reattached it but ... it's not perfect. Sometimes the c works if I really make sure I push the key down hard, sometimes I forget and I type ontrary and aount. Oh rap!

(Before you go tweeting me demanding your fiver, those ones I just wrote were intentional, okay?)

This same week I also found myself wrestling with the washing machine for the umpteenth time, holding the broken cupboard door up to stop it falling on the floor while simultaneously opening the machine door with my other hand and throwing a pile of laundry inside. I then spent several minutes trying to lodge the broken door back in place so no one would notice any difference to my other "non-broken" cupboard doors. This all coincided with my neighbour casually asking me last night if my fridge light had gone out. He'd gone looking in my fridge for a bottle of white wine. I didn't dare tell him it had gone out circa Halloween 2008.

A coach colleague of mine calls it "the sand in your shoe"... in a nutshell, it's all the stuff you're putting up with for one reason or another, the stuff that irritates the hell out of you but you just haven't got round to doing anything about. Other than moan.

The sand in your shoe, what you're putting up with, your tolerations - they can sap your time, sap your money, and more importantly, sap your energy.

Every time you walk by your desk, trying to blithely ignore the pile of papers you haven't filed yet, every time you spend twenty minutes looking for the pair of scissors somewhere in the house, every time you apologise about the mess when you offer to give your friends a lift in the car (or worse, avoid giving your friend a lift because you're too embarrassed about the state of it) - all those things you know you "should" do/be doing/have done - nag you.

And no one likes a nag. Even if it is only your Inner You nagging your Outer You. Eventually, what you're tolerating leaves you feeling overwhelmed and either unable or unwilling to tackle even the smallest thing.

A pile of filing might not seem like a priority but if it takes you 20 minutes to find a document because it's not filed properly, then it's a drain on your time, energy and money.

What are you putting up with?

Tackling your tolerations first involves finding out what they really are:

Part One:
Give yourself thirty minutes, sit down with a pen and paper or at your computer and start making your list. List every single thing you are putting up with. You don't have to limit it to tangible things either. Maybe you're putting up with your other half being constantly late, or a boss who treats you badly, or a job you've simply outgrown. List everything that's irritating you, bothering you, and generally making you feel miserable.

Don't be alarmed if you've got quite a long list there. The first time I did this I had 161 tolerations! I must have been like a bear with a sore head to be around.

Part Two:
Now decide which one of your tolerations you're going to do something about first. Then go take care of it until you can cross it off your list. Then move on to the next toleration.

You might want to tackle one thing on your list every week, or one item every day, or if you get a real burst of energy you might find yourself crossing four or five items off your list in one go.

There's a very good reason why you might do the latter. Scientists have found that accomplishing small tasks or completing a challenge releases endorphins much the same way exercise does.

Taking action and doing something about all those things that are bothering you feels good. And that creates an upward spiral, giving you a boost of energy to get even more done.

Best wishes,



Dawn