Going Solo: Week #1.

Dear 31,

It's Monday morning and I'm color coding my Google calendar, scanning the Feedly for great reads from the holiday weekend and trying to bring back #mondaypunday after an early summer hiatus. It's been a wild weekend of me loving hard on Des Moines and all it's awesomeness.

And today it's back to business. 

I survived week one of going solo. Whew. My notes in my current notebook (which appropriately is labeled "my bright ideas"- thank you Michael's clearance bin) tell me that each day I learned a little more about efficient to do list writing and about time management. I know this sounds cliche and like every entrepreneurial article I've ever read came to life in this moment, but I was busier last week than I've been in a long time.

Please admire my current office space, the Des Moines Public Library. Where the wi-fi might be a tad bit slow, but the resources sure are helpful. Tropical desktop wallpaper via Jess Lively. 

I'm still feeling hesitant and nervous about things like wedding venue deposits, health insurance competency and becoming a master at Photoshop, but I keep repeating "Be brave" to myself every morning. Seven days in, it appears to be working. 

Steal this as a reminder to yourself. My mantra dropped on last night's dangerous, yet beautiful Iowa sky.

Last week I wrote another installment of All Over the Interwebs, and you guys:

Grace and Sarah and Kal are normal, extraordinary people. 

I wrote about these awesome, inspiring power ladies, tweeted it out into the world, like I usually do, and whoa: they responded. I realize this sounds like a fangirl, nerd alert, but how can you not be excited when three women you called "power ladies" reply to your note about how they inspired you to be more confident and bad ass? These three took the time to respond, to thank me and to (maybe?) read the blog post where I call them awesome. (I've said awesome too much, but it's the best possible adjective in this case.)

This super day and act of Twitter kindness reminded me of two things:

1. Reaching out to people you think are smart, thoughtful experts is important. We all know how darn good it feels to be told you are doing something right, so why not share it sincerely and directly with your blog idols/artistic inspiration/coffee date? There's really no reason not to. In my personal quest to #sendmoremail I've made use of a whole lotta handwritten notes to say "whoa, I think you are brilliant because...." but tweets and posts can count too. Let's start saying "you're great" more often. 
2. Responding to feedback matters. I like Kal, Grace and Sarah so much more now, if that's fangirl possible, because they took the time to acknowledge me. The interwebs are a crazy place. Emails get lost, tweets and comments get forgotten (if you're me) and now that I'm relying so much on Google Calendars and juggling three very different jobs, feedback is something I've been non-awesome about. These three power ladies run companies, manage families and brands and certainly have way more than 500 page views a week. If they can find time to say "Hey thanks LP," I can do the same. 

I took a time this weekend to write out a list of 5 blog idols, artistic inspirations and coffee dates who need to know how awesome they are and 5 people who took the time to send me feedback, shout out my work or comment on my blog. This week I focus on sincere and direct feedback, and a whole lotta thank you notes.

Thanks for being awesome. 

(Now to write ten more notes from today's Library office)

xo-LP