How to keep showing up!

In the fall of my second year in business school, my friend, Candy, who'd just completed a summer job and been offered a full time post by that company for after graduation, had to go to a company recruiting cocktail party on top of studying for mid-term exams. Trying to put myself in her shoes, I sympathized with her time crunch, as well as the stress I thought this would bring (or it would have brought for me).

Candy looked at me with a wry smile, and laughed softly, "Oh, no, this isn't stressful! All I have to do is show up. I'm good at showing up!" She continued, "I'll get brownie points for showing up. That's  really all I have to do --  show up and say 'hi' to a few people I know, so that they know I'm there, as part of the team. I don't have to impress anyone -- they've already offered me the job. I don't even have to talk to the recruiters much; they're more interested in prospects they don't know."

This idea that sometimes, all you have to do is show up, stuck with me. Or as Woody Allen said, "Eighty percent of success is showing up."

I'm reminded to mention this now, because I personally have a lot to show up for at the moment. In fact, it seems never ending -- the weekly radio show, the clients, my other businesses which seem to constantly need something, let alone friends and family. (Did I mention taking the barest of acquaintances in for surgery last week because he had no one else?)

I'm actually really good at showing up. I know not everyone is, though, and I think that's mostly caused by lack of motivation. So how do you maintain your motivation?

• Keep reminding yourself of the big picture -- when you see how a tiny action can really help with the big goals of your life, you'll keep on showing up for the little stuff. 
• Remember that "A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step", as Lao-Tzu said. Yes, you have to take a lot of those single steps, but only one is the first one, and the 'showing up' ones are pretty easy.
• Ask yourself, "How much effort is this really? How can I systematize this so that I can do it with almost no effort?" For example, if you're a coffee drinker, you have surely devised a system to make coffee so efficiently that you barely notice making it any more. You can do that with many things in life.
• Try to find the fun -- or something positive -- in showing up.

Last week, I had a computer nightmare (believe me, you don't want to know the details!). Showing up to deal with it sucked. But the big picture is that I need that computer to run my businesses, and to do the radio show. The first step was to try to do the updates I needed by myself, using all the online help available in forums. When that wasn't enough, I called Apple for help. When that wasn't enough, the online help desk made me an appointment at the local Apple Store for help. When they couldn't solve my problem, they sent me to an outside company who is one of Apple's premium service sites.

There, I met the owner, who is not only the most competent Mac person I've ever met (he almost solved my problem completely, and told me how to do the rest myself), but also turned out to be interested in a lot of things I'm interested in that have nothing to do with computers -- star visitors, the unfairness of our current economic system, angels, the effects of vibrations, etc. We had a fascinating conversation that went on long past the completion of my computer issues. Meeting this man turned out to be the 'something positive' in showing up.

Staying sane in a 24/7 world

Shhh.... I have another business. It's a tiny little online business, with sales so far, in this, its first year, in the mid 3 figures. ;) Online businesses are supposed to be easy, right? Set it up, and it chugs away, as my partner in the business says, a ka-ching machine.

Not so much! It turns out that our market, CA real estate agents and brokers, is not hugely computer savvy. Many of our customers and potential customers want to talk to us before signing up, and many of our customers call us for help logging on, or re-logging on, having lost their user names or passwords. I am NOT the tech help, which is provided by our online host, another small company in Oregon, who works normal business hours, Monday - Friday, 8:30AM to 5PM.

Here's the problem: if they don't get an answer to their questions before they sign up, they just buy from someone else. If they don't get support whenever they want it, 24/7, they're angry.

And there are only two of us. Thank god it's not just me. Come to think of it, my 888-4-HOLLIS number rings 24/7, too, and if I don't answer when it rings, I lose that new customer, as well.

So how do you, a human being with normal needs for sleep and food and exercise and other bodily functions, do business in a 24/7 world?

Luckily, I have some lessons to fall back on from my Dad, who started his career in medicine as a pediatrician:

• Get help in the form of technology - Way back in the early 1960s, before there were answering machines, my Dad had an answering service. The operators worked for many physicians, and were trained to ferret out what could wait till business hours, and what was probably an emergency. The operators always knew where my Dad was (remember, this was before cell phones, too), and were trained to take the patient's name and number and then call Dad if it seemed critical.
• Get help in the form of other people - Eventually, my Dad had a partner, and they switched off weekends and holidays, so that at least every other weekend, my Dad could really relax, knowing the phone wouldn't ring.
• Pick your business carefully - My Dad switched the kind of medicine he specialized in, from pediatrics, where kids get sick all the time, to allergies, where if the patient gets his autoimmune boosting injections and is careful in avoiding certain allergens, no emergencies should come up. Still, I learned very early to always have a book with me, because we never knew when dinner might be interrupted by Dad needing to head to the office or the hospital. 

Today, we are all reachable 24/7 on our smart phones, by cell, text and email. So the problem is not how to be reachable, but how to avoid being reached, so we can preserve our humanity, our sanity, and our relationships (interrupt a romantic dinner for a client text, anyone?), and still do business. In some way, though, the same rules apply:

•  Get help in the form of technology - Set outgoing messages and autoresponders to answer with a pleasant message that includes what your normal business hours are, and what to do until then, like call emergency tech support.
•  Get help in the form of other people - We still need partners, people to cover for us when we are on vacation or out of the country. The more people who can cover, the better -- this explains the rise of large physician groups, by the way.
• Pick your business carefully - Do you want to be in a business where emergencies happen? Emergencies don't happen if you're a corporate trainer, for example. If you're in a business with emergencies, can you charge more, perhaps a LOT more, if those emergencies happen outside business hours, like plumbers do? 
• Accept that you're going to lose some business -What price are your sanity, your humanity, and your relationships worth?

If you have any ideas about what else to do, post them here or email me -- I'd love to hear them!

8 Business Lessons from the "Neighbor from Hell'

I worked really hard to get rid of the 'neighbor from hell' at a condo I own. (More about that here.) She left, finally, all because I got the owner to give me power of attorney to do it. As I look back on it, though, doing this has taught me a number of lessons which are much more widely applicable:

1) Have a clear intention (don't take no for an answer) -- The neighbor from hell (NFH) had been negatively affecting my life for years now. Because of her, I had a much harder time finding an acceptable tenant for that unit than for any other unit I own (and a few are in the neighborhood, so it really is comparing apples to apples). Further, the tenant in that unit turns over immediately at the end of each lease (if they even paid the rent on time, so that I didn't have to get rid of them earlier -- and this is the only unit where I've ever had to evict anyone).

When my wonderful current tenant gave me 60 days notice, despite acknowledging the fact that she has a lease which at that point lasted another 6 months, I got desperate. And desperation turned into determination that this ends now. And somehow, when I get determined, the universe lines up behind me. (This is most defiitely a vow, which seems to be a variant on the Law of Attraction.)

2) Be nice -- My first step was to contact the owner. Of course, I'd been trying that without success for over a year. She wouldn't answer my phone calls or emails. So what I did was pay her a visit. How did I have her address? When she bought the property, back in 2006, I was nice. I called her up (got that number because the former owner was a friend -- see, I'm nice), and said, "If I can help you in any way, please let me know. And oh, by the way, please give me your contact info", which she did.

3) Be organized -- I'm fanatic about keeping people's contact information. If you give me a card, all that goes into my database, even if I don't put you on my mailing list. My database is over 3000 records, everyone from the plumber to the dentist to the health insurance company to my extended family to my clients and on and on. So when I needed this woman's address, there it was, easy to find.

4) Know the rules of the game -- It's important to know what you can do, and what you can't. Without the owner authorizing me to do it, neither I nor my tenants could evict the NFH, who was essentially a squatter, paying no rent, no water or sewer bill, no gas bill, putting slugs in the communal washing machine. My tenant couldn't put the stuff the NFH had wrongly stored in my tenant's half of the shared garage out on the driveway, or in the dumpster -- that would have been illegal. We could, however, call the police to keep an eye on the place, and file lots of complaints about the bad behavior of the NFH. We could call Child Protective Services to have the mother investigated for leaving her minor child unsupervised for a week at a time. And with the power of attorney from the owner, I can file an unlawful detainer suit, which will eventually get her out for sure.

5) You can't always be nice -- Some people, like like the Neighbor from Hell, don't respond to nice. You can ask a Neighbor from Hell something nicely, and she'll either ignore you, or smile, say yes, and then ignore you. With these people, you have to be tough. That means using all the resources available to you -- veiled threats, contracts, police, Child Protective Services, the courts, whatever. (NLP would say, "the most flexible system always wins". And by trying everything, I am being flexible as hell.)

6) Talk to people in terms they'll understand -- This is actually a basic principle of NLP, phrased as "The meaning of communication is the response you get." I always took this to mean that if you didn't get the response you wanted from the words you chose, you should try different words.

That's part of it. Another part of communication is not your words, it's your actions. The NFH basically lives by working the system (Section 8 & disability payments for 5 years that I know of, even though she's capable of painting apartments for extra income). So I made sure that the information came from an authority figure (attorney), who said that if I even filed an unlawful detainer (i.e. eviction) lawsuit, it would follow her around forever. (Translation: you'll have a really hard time finding another apartment for the rest of your life.) Funny thing, the U-Haul truck made regular appearances right after that.

7) Be transparent -- that is, tell the truth, and tell it to everyone who needs hear it. This is one of the wonders of email. You can easily have a one to many conversation. You don't have to say the same thing over and over to keep everyone up to date, and you don't have to wonder who said what to whom, or when. When I email my tenant about what's going on, I often cc the property owner, the attorney and the police. Same thing when they email me. That way, everyone is on the same page, and we can all go forward together. In fact, we all begin to trust each other more, too.

8) Reach out to the community -- When I told a friend my saga of the NFH, she said, it sounds like bad custody battle. And she has a point. The custody problem is directly between the parents, but it affects the children, and anyone to whom those kids act out. A people problem is therefore a problem for the community. This is why Child Protective Services exist. It's why police, aka peace officers, exist. It's why the courts exist. They are all her to provide formal community solutions to community problems. Use them.