I played a character in a short film called “Trail of Gold.” I also wrote an original song for the film and performed it in the film. The producer, Vincent Lowe posted a video on Youtube of the one take performance mixed as a vignette of scenes from the film. Unfortunately, the film’s editing wasn’t completed so you can’t see it in it’s entirety at this point and I haven’t cut this in the studio, but I was lucky to get this piece to share with you. I hope you enjoy it.
Wow, I can’t believe this is the ninth week! I have to tell you that I’ve played virtually no music over the last 9 weeks I’ve been so busy with all the changes I’m making. I think the foundation is laid from here on out and I’ll be able to focus a little more on the craft but there is a list of 22 things that I have to complete as of yet. For instance, I’m in the process of making ringtones which unfortunately, ReverbNation is doing a store overhaul so I can’t post them right now which is a bummer because I’m very excited about these. I did a test run of “Island of Misfit Toys” and sent it to my phone and I’ve shared it with a couple friends by having them call me, and watching their faces light up when it’s playing on my phone has been a very cool experience. I may look for another way to host them so keep a lookout for a service that will allow me to sell them either directly from my site or host them but give me an API that links back to their service. Oh, and by the way, that’s the topic of this week’s chapter in the book, what Ariel calls the “Continuum Program.”
Ariel really wants you to make money and doing it alone with just music isn’t necessary. That’s why she encourages you to look at other things you can provide to your customers like merchandise emblazoned with your logo, private shows, cheap downloads, or free downloads with email subscriptions (which I’ve already done). But she doesn’t stop there. She’s really trying to get you to think about how you can create an ongoing relationship with your customers, engaging them into a distribution funnel that starts with the inexpensive and capturing their interest by producing more exclusive products or programs that cost more money, but provide more exclusivity to them. I think that much of the thinking behind this is concurrent with a thread that she’s been writing about based on the 1,000 true fans theory that basically encourages you to find the right number of die-hard fans that are enraptured with your output. You cater to those fans with what they love about you and it’s a win/win: They support you by buying your products and you support them by being the creative you that you are.
There are a number of program ideas that the book suggests for keeping momentum with your fans and engaging new fans. Things like special exclusive events with the band, monthly gifts, artist critiques and even a private VIP fan website. I’m going to start out slowly on this because being one artist with a full-time job, I can only do so much and I really need to build a fanbase from the publicity work I’m doing from the last 9 weeks, which unfortunately doesn’t seem to have made much of a different yet except that my mp3 sales are improving a little. But, I got a great idea from my friend, JC which is to try to sell prints of my artwork on FineArtAmerica.com. I’ve had some drawing on my website for a long time and I have hi-def slides as well so I’m gonna go get them re-digitized and post them hopefully within the week and see if I can’t sell some prints. I also have a number of drawings that are near completion that I’ll add to the mix and maybe I can combine some art sales with music sales. The proposition is exciting! So keep a lookout for that.
I also wanted to add that the end of the book has a couple bonus chapters on traditional PR and choosing the right publicist. I really found the traditional PR chapter to be quite interesting and wish that I’d seen it a long time ago. Ariel includes comments from a couple of journalists who write about musicians and gets some nice feedback from them about what they like and how they like to receive press kits to possibly write about. I’ve seen other articles along these lines but what stands out about this one is the immense detail about the press kit itself, representing that press kit on your web site, and the pertinent advice on follow-up. I myself have not done due-diligence on follow-up sometimes and I know that I’ve suffered for it. You have to do it which means you need to keep track of when and where and who you send something to and be ready to follow-up a couple of weeks later. I remember listening to a panel once of music reviewers for agencies and someone on the panel talked about their office. It had three boxes in it. The first box got all the mail-ins of CDs. If an artist made contact one time either by phone or email, someone would hunt down the CD in the first box and move it over to the second box. If the artist made a second attempt at contact or follow-up, the CD would be moved from the second box and into a box that actually sat on the reviewers desk where it would be reviewed. Sounds a little nuts until you see the wall of CDs on some people’s desks.
One thing I’m learning about the music business: It’s a little what you know, who you know, what you do… and how much endurance you have. This concludes our regularly scheduled program. Please stay tuned to find out how this big shift will play out in 2010. I’m really wanting big things to happen this year and I’m really hoping that the effort that I’ve put into this blogging contest has will pay off. I would love to be publicized by Ariel. She rawks and has truly been inspiring too me!
Well, this is really winding down now. This week’s chapter is fairly short and relatively simple and all about non-virtual communication with people. For instance, going to a party or other event and really staying focused on what you want to achieve when talking to people face to face. I’m not sure who does that anymore but it sounds intriguing. ;O)
Ariel cites Larry Sharpe as the inspiration for some of the information in the chapter and explains the reasons why we network, like finding customers, gaining a sphere of influence and finding resources for new ventures. She’s emphatic about being memorable by getting other people to talk about themselves. I actually really enjoy getting people to talk about themselves so this is easy. I rarely ever say anything about myself unless asked, because frankly, conversation is a two-way street. Now, if someone only likes talking about themselves, I’d just give them a mirror and find someone else to talk with. But maybe now, I’ll give them a business card first, which just happens to be another bit of strategy that Ariel gives.
For getting business cards done, Ariel recommends Vista Print for free cards and Jak Prints for designing your own. I’ve actually been getting cards made at Vista Print for years for the price of shipping. You can choose from a number of templates which change often enough that you may be original, provided that you don’t use the one with the red painted tapestry with the microphone in front. I got that one when it came out and so did 1,000 other musicians. It was kinda funny actually. The only catch is that they put their logo on one side. When “Between the Lines” came out, I got custom cards made with one of the photos from the photo shoot for the cover of the CD, and really spent time crafting a card that was part of the image I was working with for the new CD. They came out very nicely and were dirt cheap, they threw in a custom mailing ink stamp for outgoing mail which is getting a lot of use when I send CDs out, and the turn-around was lightening fast. I highly recommend them. There are some tips about what to put on the card, like your pitch, a photo, something that indicates what you do or play, email, and links to web sites where you’re found. I did all those things and people have actually hung up my card because they like the picture on it, so I know what Ariel is saying is right on.
So, without using the word “intention”, Ariel very much is recommending that you know what you want out of making a contact in a social situation. Setting intention is such a powerful thing because it sets a lot of wheels in motion because you’re putting out there what it is you want, and when you do that, you draw situations toward you that support your intention. Even when meeting people, have a vision of what you’d like to receive, and then be willing to put effort into following up with people that you meet to find out how you can get what you want from them and give them what it is they’re looking for. It’s about creating synergy with people. I always try and think about my music as being something that people really want so that when I’m sharing with them, it’s not laborious to be selling myself. But I’ve found that you have to let them open the door to you, and they do that when they know you’re listening too them. I just never try and sell something without being invited which is why I’ll never be a door-to-door salesman.
“In order to be successful you must think about your fans as customers”, Ariel says. First, wrapping my head around fans is enough. I know I have people that like my music and I’ve sold music to them, but when I think of the word “fan”, it’s hard to picture these people as fans because I know nearly all of these people personally. They’re friends, family, acquaintances, people that I see around. I haven’t made a really long reach yet, and I have trouble reconstituting these people as customers. I have asked them to buy music from me and review it, but I do so thinking that they want to support me as their wacko music writing buddy. Maybe a shift in my perspective will help, but I’ve never really enjoyed sales. I think that’s probably the point here is to start thinking like a business person. I find something that helps is only sell when the other person expresses interest. That’s the opening to shift to sales person. Don’t try to sell to someone before you know that they have interest. This helps me stay authentic.
There are a ideas in chapter 6 of the book Music Success in Nine Weeks that I like better than the last one. Make ringtones out of songs. ReverbNation has a new store and selling ringtones is something they offer their artists so I’m going to try and get a few good excerpts of songs to post there and see how that works. Something else I’ve thought of doing is making stickers. I really like the Rhythma logo and I think it would make great rub-on decals, so that’s on my list of things to do. How many of you would buy stickers, 2 for a buck? Do I hear t-shirts?
A good portion of the chapter is dedicated to email marketing and building your email list. I’ve had an email list for over 5 years now. It’s not a huge list, and I don’t send out that many emails which according to Ariel is not good. You need to be consistent and frequent. For much of last year, I abandoned the list because I wasn’t doing much music as other things had priority in my life. I shant do that again. She really presses the idea of knowing your audience so that you can think of interesting and relevant things to add to the newsletter to make it compelling. I’ve always thought of the common thread is the love of music so I only talk about things that are going on musically. People are so inundated with content being pushed to them that I tend to keep my newsletters short and to the point. According to my analytics, only 30% of my newsletter mail-outs are read. That’s a really big concern and I don’t know what to do about it. Is it spam, are they getting lost in the shuffle, or are they just being deleted? I recently upgrade my software and found that there are rejections from some servers thinking that I’m spam. I’m remedying this. Spam is a real problem because it’s easy to get black-listed from major email servers if a few people have a spam happy trigger finger or mass mailings to larger email servers trigger their alerts and once you’re on those lists, they’re really hard to get off of.
The other thing about the newsletter is the formatting. I always keep my subject line reading, “Sean Michael Imler AKA Rhythma Newsletter.” That’s pretty clear. The book then talks about the 3 G’s: greeting, guts, and getting. Got that the greeting as my software Active Campaign’s 12All adds personalization of the sendee via hooks. The gut is the content which should always be compelling in my opinion. Getting is where you get the readers to do something, which I’ve always done, no matter if it’s primary or secondary to the guts of the email. She prescribes only one call to action tho. I’m a firm believer in staying to one point. Readers can only handle so much at once and will easily miss the point because most people are skimming because of time constraints.
Last but not least, she recommends surveys. I’ve haven’t done this in a long time, since before I put out my first CD in 2005. Anyone remember the poll I did to decide which songs to put on “Rhythma?” Well, I set up a new poll. It was pretty easy to do now that I’m using Wordpress. I used a plugin called WP-Polls. It was a little tricky to hook up because you have to have the wp-head and wp-foot php includes in your templates. I’d removed mine not thinking they were needed and I ended up at their forum trying to debug why it wasn’t working, but it’s all good now. I posted my first poll asking everyone to pick between two versions of a song that I recorded.
So, this is good: Ariel’s getting me to be more active with my email list. A couple of sites she recommends to use for email lists and polls are SurveyMonkey and BandLetter. They seem like pretty cools sites but I’m such a DIYer, I probably won’t go down that road. ;O)
I submitted this to a Taxi listing that was calling for a tense acoustic singer/songwriter type song that raised an air of suspicion for an indie film. I thought that “Falling” was perfect but it wasn’t dark enough so I rewrote it in E minor and rerecorded it. Unfortunately it didn’t get selected. But, I have something to share with you so check it out. You can even leave me a comment. If I get some decent responses, maybe I’ll polish and produce it with more instrumentation and it will make it onto my next CD.
This week seems to have gone by really quickly. I’m still grappling with identity in Flickr and how much personal stuff to share. I can’t seem to make a decision around some things that I wrote about in last week’s post especially concerning Flickr and I’ve neglected to write down the user/pass that I created for the MyBlogLog account that I created as a todo in Week 5 of the book. The most ironic thing is that I had a “personal” MyBlogLog account, and like the Flickr account, I wanted to try to separate Rhythma from everyday Sean, and it might just be that I can’t do it.
It’s quite a commitment to work thru this book and update my blog each week for each chapter, but I’m persistent and will prevail. And, speaking of blogs, that’s the topic for this week: Gittin’ yer blog on. So, if you read my first post, you’ll know that it was a big deal for me to turn this blog loose because although I’d been keeping a dream blog for about 5 years, I’d never made it public. Now that you may have read some of my dreams, you’ll see they can range from short and bizarre to long and bizarrer. I’ve added two other categories, “Rhythma Music” which I’ll file this post under, and “Life in General” which is not getting many posts because I can’t seem to find the time to upload my pictures to Flickr or anything else because this project is taking so much time and after that, there’s music. So, no life.
To turn my blog on was quite the effort because my OCD kicks in whenever I’m working on the computer. I get a vision in my head of the way something needs to be, and I work relentlessly to achieve it. In this case, I had to first upgrade Wordpress from version 0.9 to 2.8. A quick synopsis of Wordpress would be that it’s a very nicely written blogging application that you install on an internet server so that you can host your own blog under your own domain. When you look at Rhythma.com in it’s current state, you’ll see that there are links in the left hand side that take you to other pages in the site where you can look at photos and listen to music, but in the middle is my blog. The comparison would be to look at Blogger.com where they are the host for someone’s blog which you can write once you’ve created a user account with them, but your blog will always be on Blogger.com. I’ve always liked hosting my own content. In fact, I ran my web site from my own server out of my house until about 4 years ago when I finally decided to have godaddy.com host it because I was tired of the maintenance and hack attacks. BTW – I really like godaddy.com hosting.
Wordpress is nice because if you don’t know too much about web sites, you can install Wordpress with an incredibly simple installation! If you want to make Wordpress look different from the default look, you can pick from hundreds of themes that users have created that give you different styling options and page layouts. It’s really awesome. For me tho, I needed to make Wordpress look and feel like my current web site because I’d been running it at an exclusive url and never bothered to give it the look and feel of Rhythma.com. To do this, I had to learn how to create my own theme. Once I did that, I got the current layout that you see on my site, with the addition of plugins available from Wordpress. A plugin is a chunk of code that does a particular task that you can add onto an application. The plugins that I’m using and I highly recommend are:
Twitter Goodies – I use this to send the titles and links back to my blog posts to my Twitter Page. I could have Socialite do that for me as it is a feature of that plugin but I have Facebook set up to post all of my tweets to my main Facebook. Not to mention that I get that dandy little right side bar widget that reposts my tweets right back to Rhythma.com.
Find Me On – This gives me the six icons on the right hand side above the Twitter Feed that point to the social networks where I have content that I want to share with my visitors. You can choose from a whole bunch of them and the icons are very nicely made.
The book recommends that you not only have an outgoing blog to share parts of yourself but that you engage with other blogs online to establish a connection with bloggers that you might at some time get to review your music. This is a road I’ve been down and I’ll share with you my experience and also some of Ariel’s thoughts around this. Music bloggers are a very busy lot. New music is coming out constantly and it’s really hard to get them to write you up. Last year, I went to SXSW and sat in on some panels that talked a lot about bloggers and a tactic that I learned was simply to hunt down music blogs that might be apt to review music like yours. I find my music somewhat similar to Brett Dennen and since he’s been getting traction, what I did was do searches online for “music blogs” and “brett dennen” and came up with a good list of thirty blogs that had reviewed Brett. I then went to each one of them and tracked down who wrote the article and how to contact them or how to send them music. Then, I bookmarked each of those sites and sent out lots and lots of emails. I sent out mp3s via email and even sent out actual CDs for review. The result: Not one review. Months went by and nothing… Pretty disheartened, I wasn’t sure what to do next. After reading week 5, I learned that bloggers are a finicky bunch and to get reviewed by them, you need to become one of them. So, if you notice down the right hand side of my web site, there’s a long list of music blogs or what you might call a blogroll. Ariel’s suggestion is to go to these sites and create an accounts there, make comments on articles, let the writers get to know you, and then… slip in that you create music and maybe they’d want to check it out. The bottom line is that bloggers have a lot of influence over real music lovers, so I’m putting this into practice. Like many of the suggestions in this book, this will take some time to garner results, so I’ll have to get back to you on that. Plus, I need to increase the number of blogs from 30 to 50.
I’ve gone thru the trouble to create this blog because as Ariel points out, it’s really important for your fans to be able to get to know you and it’s important to create as much of a presence on the internet as possible. Big brands spend thousands of dollars in marketing just keep their brand in the public eye and in your face. They do that because of what I call “out of sight, out of mind” which all of us suffer from when we don’t keep in touch with our friends and you find out about the great party that you missed because they forgot to call you ‘cos they hadn’t heard from you in three months while you were dating that hotty that you met at the club, etc. And really, the bottom line for all artists is that you always need to be generating stuff, all the time. If it’s not going to be music, stay in the rounds, keep posting your ideas, thoughts, photos, tweets, anything so that you don’t get forgotten.
Week 4 is brutal. In fact, I’ve been working on week 4 for 4 weeks. The book, “Music Success in Nine Weeks” is theoretically structured in a way that you “could” follow it week to week and complete the 9 main chapters giving each a week to accomplish, but realistically, it’s more complicated than that. Depending on the kind of free time, technical know-how, and desire you have, you may or may not be able to follow this letter for letter.
Chapter 4 is all about social networking. In my case, I have a number of the things that the book suggests already in place; i.e., a mailing list, Flickr, Twitter, Facebook, and MySpace accounts. At a bird’s eye view, it doesn’t take long to create an account on each of these sites, but grokking how to use them does take a while. Establishing a presence that is consistent visually can be a large time sync, and really getting MySpace and Facebook off the ground can take a very long time.
I’ve had my MySpace account for ages and it’s barely attracted any friends mainly because I don’t like to use it. I find it more tedious than enjoyable, and frankly, I have enough things in my life that I “have” to do. The problem is that much of the music industry still judges you on your outreach to fans and number of friends you have on MySpace and for good reason: The last statistic I heard about MySpace was that even tho it’s fallen behind Facebook in unique visitors, it’s still at about 50M. That’s a LOT of people. Also, if you want to get gigs, it’s a great way to find out about venues in cities you haven’t played before. Just find a musical artist or group that sounds like you in a particular locale and see where they play, that simple.
For me, striking a balance between the have-tos and the want-tos is critical. Managing Facebook and Twitter has much more appeal for me than MySpace because Twitter is just plain easy and Facebook keeps me connected to my actual friends. I’m able to have a personal page and an artist page and even tho the two are barely connected thru the Facebook interface, they’re easy to manage and stay connected to people, not just about what you’re doing but seeing where they’re doing. So, all in all, I think you should put your energy where you’re going to receive enjoyment out of the process. If you’re enjoying it, it will reflect in your presentation. By all means, keep your want-tos and your have-tos in balance.
One of the things that’s really baffled me about the social networking part of this is something that I brought up in a previous blog post, What a Big Day This Is!, and it’s the private vs. public life situation. I’m not by any means comparing myself with big names like Tiger Woods or Bill Clinton, but look what happens when you do something controversial that captures the public eye. They rake you thru the coals and it’s not pretty. How are you able to keep a private life separate from a performance life? And with social networking, that line gets blurred even more. The latest talk in the music industry is all about exposing yourself as a person, not just a performer up on a stage, where the fans get to know you and possibly have one-on-one contact with you. That’s all well and good, but where is the line drawn? Is there a line? I’ve been facing this dilemma especially with Flickr. I guess I can kinda consider myself an old skool Flickr user, since 2003 actually. What I ended up doing was starting a new Flickr account just for music related photos. I’ve decided not to connect my personal account with my music account. Ariel suggests letting your fans get to know you at more of a personal level and I’m okay with this to an extent. But the way I’m looking at it, if I post something to my blog about my personal life, it will be premeditated. I will have decided to divulge something about myself that I feel is something I’m comfortable sharing. It took a long time for me to decide to expose my dream blog, but in the same way that I will only share photos that are relevant to my music, I’ll only share dreams that don’t cross the line of the ultra personal. This is completely subjective and probably different for everyone, and even for me, that line could change at any time. Maybe to truly be a successful artist, you have to be completely exposed! I’m not sure. A teacher of mine, Jan Engels-Smith told me that when she was writing her book Becoming Yourself, she received guidance that she needed to be completely open about her personal life to touch her readers. In a lot of ways, I do that as a song writer as many others do, and maybe that line is part of every artist’s personal journey.
Ariel’s step-by-step procedure for each site is comprehensive and she points the user to commoncraft.com to watch well done videos that explain in detail the concepts that she’s sharing in this chapter and other parts of the book. You’re in good hands here, and probably have a small likely-hood of failing if you dig in and follow her plan. I’ll probably be working with this chapter for a while myself and there have been some really good suggestions that will take time to implement and seed with information and photos, etc.
Last but not least was the inclusion of your music in podcasts. I’m still working on this angle. What I decided to do was offer some of my songs on my first CD without voice, just instrumental which I thought would be good for background music because there’s a lot of electronic texturing in the songs. I’ve bounced down the songs and I’ve converted them to mp3. Next, I’ll update the id3 tags using dbBpoweramp which is an awesome music converter that runs on Windows. The site I’ll upload the music to is Music Alley which connects musicians to podcasters. I’ll have to get back too you on the success of this venture, but right now, it looks promising.
I think that’s it for now. Stay tuned for next week’s chapter on blogging. This gets really interesting, technically.
If you’ve followed my last couple of posts, you’ll know that I’m participating in a contest created by Ariel Hyatt of Ariel Publicity. The second chapter of the book is all about defining who you are as an artist, and the style of music that you do. To help you define yourself, Ariel takes you thru some exercises to help you create “The Perfect Pitch.” This pitch should be something you can use at the drop of a dime when someone asks you about who you sound like, what your music evokes in others, what to expect should someone come to see you perform live, what your CD might sound like. Many have called it an elevator pitch because from the moment you step into an elevator til the time you step out, you should have been able to share you with someone else to the point that they have a somewhat clear understanding of you as an artist. Sounds easy, right? NOT.
Now, I’ve always felt there was value to having a moniker, a one-liner, and something that accompanies the name, “Rhythma”, if not for any other reason than to just inform someone that I’m a musician. So, as many of you probably know, I’ve been using “Music for the heart, mind, and spirit…” for years. I still think this is sufficient for the purpose of adding something to Rhythma for high level clarification. The thing that’s gotten tricky for me is that Ariel’s book wants you to put your perfect pitch on myspace, twitter, facebook, your web site… and I think that there are different pitches for different reasons. My moniker is already on all those sites as well as my business card and has been for a long time. The only thing that’s left me unsettled is that it doesn’t work when someone wants a clearer idea of who I sound like. This is where Ariel’s technique came into play.
She had me break down certain elements of my musical style, influences, and other details, and then combine these elements into the pitch. Then you have to try the pitch on for a while to see how it sticks. If it sticks, then you get another unique addition which is access to her private ning.com group where you can try the pitch out with your peers to see how they react too it. This was helpful too me since I couldn’t come up with just one pitch.
So, all in all, I decided to stay with:
“Music for the heart, mind, and spirit…”
for my overall catch phrase which accompanies my profiles online, my web site, and my business card. It feels right for me. However, when asked to describe my music in the elevator, I’ve settled on:
“If Paul Simon produced Jack Johnson in a studio a Tesla coil.”
Now, if that’s just too obscure for someone or they just stepped off the boat and ask me, “Who is Jack Johnson?”, then I’ll try this:
“Where pop, rock, jazz, folk and hip-hop collide.”
If that doesn’t work, I’ll just tell them I’m the TV repair man and I’m offering year-end discounts right now.
As I commented on in a previous post, I’m participating in a contest to get 3 months of dedicated publicity. To win, I must post 9 blog entries taking readers through my experience with the book and blogging about how it is helping, where I’ve learned the most, and where I’m are getting stuck.
The book is “Music Success in Nice Weeks” by Ariel Hyatt. It’s a “step-by-step guide on how to use social media & online tactics to supercharge your PR, build your fan base, and earn money.” Sounds pretty good, eh?
Week 1: Getting mentally prepared. This chapter wasn’t really about music or social media, but rather to put perspective into the next 8 chapters and help the reader decide on the goals that they want to achieve. I love the way the universe works with this kinda stuff… just a week prior to reading this chapter, I had a conversation with my friend Marilyn Schwader who runs a business and website called, Clarity of Vision. Her business is teaching writers how to market themselves, and she has a free download on her site that outlines the in-depth process if envisioning your long-term goals for your career as a writer, much as Ariel’s book leads you thru exercises to define your goals as a musician. Marilyn’s approach is to create mission objectives, and to define your dream, your purpose, and your values, which in many ways requires you to look at things from a more “spiritual” perspective. Kind of like, “Why are you here in on Earth in the first place and how does that define who you are and why you’re writing?” Ariel’s approach is more practical and calculated. Determine your goals, both short and long-term, not just for your music, but for your money, your family, and your long-term goals for life, and do those in both 12 month and in your lifetime.
I found Ariel’s approach to be a little more complicated because I don’t like thinking about things in terms of goals. For me, my goal is to make it to tomorrow. My goal is to make the right decisions for myself so that I perform well at work, so that I can sing well the next time I perform, so that I remember to to remember my friends so that remain my friends, so that I don’t go too long without calling my mother. In other words, my goals are very practical and rarely extend beyond tomorrow. This is all well and good, but it’s really not the philosophie du jour. Back in the day, Ram Dass was saying “Be Here Now.” Well damn, it took all this effort to learn to pull my head out of the clouds and actually commit to doing the things I was dreaming about, and I’m here, now what? Now I have to make goals? Isn’t this just like putting my head back into the clouds? Well, I’m trying not to think so.
Ariel’s and Marilyns approaches both touch on something a little more woo woo, that is, a little less accepted and sometimes hard to fathom, but never-the-less proven by quantum physics and by modern psychology. It’s around manifesting your reality by defining it. This is so critical to this whole procedure that Ariel put it in chapter one of her book. Marylin would rather you not move forward with her program until you go thru her exercises. These principles are the same that the movie “The Secret” tries to teach it’s audience: Form follows thought. Simple to say, much more difficult grasp. Ariel’s book engages this principle by asking the reader to first adopt of perspective of positive thinking and let go of self criticism and gives some ideas on how to do it. I’m all for that! By insisting that you create goals, she assures you that this it the first step to achieving them. I’m for that too!
I’m not going to tell you what my goals are. By following Ariel’s approach, I expect that over the coming months, you’ll see the results and they’ll speak for themselves. I am pumped because I’m gonna focus on nothing else until I see this plan executed. I expect it’ll be like going to school. You know when the semester’s going to end so it puts a nice frame around things. And this contest is another motivator to get this accomplished in the specified time frame. Actually, I’ve already leaped ahead in the book, that’s why I have this blog in the first place, because chapter 5 made me do it. In the coming weeks, I’ll recap some of the technical things I’ve done to get things up and running for myself, and being that I’m a web professional, I’ll try and do it for both the nubes and the geeks.
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