RISK = Results by Eldonna Lewis-Fernandez
Heart of a Woman in Business| No Comments »RISK = Results
September 1, 2008 post
by Eldonna Lewis-Fernandez, MSgt USAF Retired
Toastmasters is an international non-profit education organization with local clubs where a person can learn how to speak in front of an audience in a safe and supportive environment. As a member you are given a book with 10 speeches to complete in order to receive your Competent Communicator award. The speeches are timed and an evaluator provides feedback after each speech. A mentor is assigned to each member to help them prepare their speeches and practice outside the club. Public speaking ranks as the number one fear in the minds of most people. It even exceeds the fear of death or disease in most cases! For many, joining a Toastmasters club is a huge risk to undertake. I joined Toastmasters in November of 2006 to improve my speaking skills.
Most Toastmasters know Sheryl Roush. Her story is like many who step out of their comfort zone and take a risk to change their lives. She joined Toastmasters and began to do the speeches in the Competent Communicator manual. She cried through her first 3 speeches but she kept coming back and continued to try. Today she is a highly sought after and amazing international speaker. I met Sheryl at Book Expo America (BEA) in May of this year. She was doing a book signing for her book Heart of a Woman and I was one of the first in line to get a copy. She is an inspiration to me. She is someone who took a risk and used the skills that Toastmasters taught her to live her dream and become a professional speaker. When it was my turn I mentioned I was in Toastmasters too and she recognized me from the District One competition last year. She signed a copy of the book for me and gave me a card with some information about submitting a write-up for her next book “Heart of a Woman in Business.” I had about a month until the deadline for submission. I went home excited about the possibility of submitting something about my experiences in business.
A few days after BEA I started to work on the write-up. It had to be 1200 words or less. I had a rough draft going when I started three weeks of intense coaching certification training and had no time to work on it until the last few days of June. The submission was due 1 July and I worked on it every night those last few days until 30 June. I reviewed it a few times and let it sit for most of the day on 1 July, then reviewed it one more time and made some final adjustments. I was taking a risk just submitting it. I felt like I was basically an unknown and what if it gets turned down? Then I re-framed my thinking and set the intention that it would be accepted and took a deep breath and hit send. I decided taking the risk and stepping out of my comfort zone was a better choice than to not submit anything and always wonder what would have happened if I’d just taken the chance. I have a dream to be a published author, professional speaker and television/movie personality. It’s only a dream unless I take some action to move it forward. I decided to make choices instead of excuses. It’s easy to tell yourself you won’t make it so why try or you don’t want to risk getting rejected but I decided to take the RISK 4 maximum results.
I got confirmation the same day I sent in the submission that it had been received and they would be reviewing it and getting back to me. A couple weeks after that I received an e-mail asking for my website information and the title of my write-up. I got a little excited wondering if it had made the cut. I didn’t hear anything else for over a month. I knew the book was coming out in October so I let it go for the time being. Around mid-August my curiosity was getting the best of me. Did they accept it? I re-read what I wrote and felt confident it sounded book worthy. I sent an e-mail asking if my submission had been accepted. To my delight and utter excitement the answer was YES! My write-up will be published in the Heart of a Woman in Business book to be released on 1 Oct 08! <The book released EARLY on 9 Sept 08>
I am so excited to be a contributor to this wonderful book and that the book is going to be published with my write-up included in it. I took a risk by sending my submission in. I could have made the choice to not submit the write-up so I didn’t have to risk the possibility of rejection. Instead I took that risk and now am glad I did. Not only will my contribution help people who read this book, it also is an example of what can happen if you take a risk in your life and put yourself out there to accomplish your dreams. It also gives me encouragement to take more risks as I manifest my empire of change to make a difference in others lives.
If you’ve taken a risk in your life and gotten some positive results, I’d love for you to share your comments at the end of this post. You can share your experience, strength and hope with others and show them that they too can achieve maximum results if they have the courage to take a risk today.
Eldonna Lewis-Fernandez, MSgt USAF Retired
Dynamic Vision Intl, Speaker & RISK 4 Results Coach
Harley Riding Bad Biker Chic, Ex Military, Girlie Girl in PINK!
http://dynamicvisionintl.com
Meet the Contributors: Debra Snider
Heart of a Woman in Business, Meet the Contributors| No Comments »Meet the Contributors: Debra Snider
The new Heart of a Woman in Business book, authored by Sheryl Roush, boasts over eighty professional women as contributors, sharing their original short stories, poems, quotations, insights and business tips.
Meet contributor Debra Snider!
Two of her works are showcased in the Heart of a Woman in Business book:
"The Nature of Leadership and Personal Ambition," is an excerpt from her novel A Merger of Equals." Suit Yourself and Become a Star" offers a detailed bulleted list of tips in the chapter entitled Best Practices, Strategies & Ideas.
Debra Snider is an author, speaker, no-longer-practicing lawyer and former financial services senior executive. Her novel A Merger of Equals has been called "the thinking woman’s dream–a fun story chock-full of important and inspiring lessons about the true nature of personal and professional success."
Debra has two grown children with her husband of 31 years and is a relatively recent transplant from Chicago to Henderson, Nevada. In addition to being a swimmer and a blackjack player, Debra is on the Executive Council of Reading In Motion, an innovative arts-based literacy program dedicated to improving literacy in Chicago’s most disadvantaged kids. She is also a member of The Chicago Network, Chicago’s premier group of businesswomen, and on the Advisory Board of The Corporate Legal Standard, Inc.
For more information, check out:
http://www.debrasnider.com/
http://debrasnider.blogspot.com/
Meet the Contributors: Christine Kloser
Heart of a Woman in Business, Meet the Contributors| No Comments »Meet the Contributors: Christine Kloser
The new Heart of a Woman in Business book, authored by Sheryl Roush, boasts over eighty professional women as contributors, sharing their original short stories, poems, quotations, insights and business tips.
Meet contributor Christine Kloser!
Her sage tips and inspiration "Fulfill Your Heart’s Desire," is an excerpt printed in Inspiration to Realization is the first posting in the new womens’ book. Her poem "Let Your Business Lead You" is an excerpt from The Freedom Formula, posted in the Entrepreneurial Spirit Chapter of Heart of a Woman in Business.
Sheryl originally met Christine in the National Speakers Association/Greater Los Angeles Chapter in 2005. Christine facilitated her NEW group in Los Angeles, and asked Sheryl to come and speak for the organization on designing promtoional materials for small businesses, solopreneurs.
As an entrepreneur, Christine initially learned the lessons she expounds in her new book The Freedom Formula the hard way—ultimately discovering that by embracing her spiritual values, success came to her much more readily and easily.
Born in Binghamton, New York and raised in West Hartford, CT, Kloser graduated from Providence College with a B.S. in Business Administration. After college, she headed to San Diego, where she landed a job at the city’s top rock music radio station. There she honed her skills working in six different departments, before heading back to Connecticut as an account executive for Hartford’s leading station.
But the West Coast called her back and she landed in Los Angeles where she decided to take advantage of the market’s passion for physical fitness. Having grown up as a competitive figure skater and dancer, she launched a career as a private personal trainer, her first entrepreneurial venture. For eight years she had a very successful home-based business. Seeking to expand her wings in business, she opened a personal training gym and private yoga studio.
“This is when my easy 20-hour work-week turned into 70-hour work-weeks, and I made less money due to the overhead of a brick and mortar operation,” notes Christine. “This experience caused me to seek out support from other women entrepreneurs.”
When she couldn’t find it anywhere else, she elected to start a small dinner group where a few friends would gather for dinner once a month to talk about business and support each other in the pursuit of their dreams. The small dinner group very quickly turned into a full-fledged women’s networking organization with 500 members and dinner meetings in five locations throughout Southern California. Called the Network for Empowering Women Entrepreneurs (NEW), it clearly struck a cord with women who needed the support and collegial exchange that the organization afforded.
Through NEW, Christine realized the importance of infusing such business meetings with more spiritual principles.
“We started meeting with guided meditations and ended these meetings holding a sacred space for each other’s dreams to be realized,” she says. “I began to see a direct correlation between an entrepreneur’s spiritual foundation and her level of success.”
It was also through NEW that she launched a seminar company to introduce members to a variety of entrepreneurial experts, which continued to infuse her work life with spiritual principles, practices and flow.
The growth of NEW led directly to Christine publishing her first book in 2004, Inspiration to Realization, an anthology written by 40 members of the organization, which was reviewed in Entrepreneur Magazine soon after its release. The review lead to greater interest in Christine’s fledgling publishing company, and she ended up producing two additional books in that series.
But while her newly founded publishing house was taking off, Christine’s yoga studio was floundering.
“The wisdom I discovered as the Founder and CEO of NEW came in handy when my yoga studio nearly forced me into bankruptcy,” she explains. “I relied on NEW and its members to keep me going when I was faced with fear about possibly losing everything. It was through these very challenging times that I learned the most about business and began to lay the foundation for what is now known as The Freedom Formula. The Freedom Formula is what helped me avoid bankruptcy and create the business (and life) of my dreams.”
Christine began to codify the way she integrated spiritual consciousness into her work and lifestyle, employing those practices in the growth of her company and then penning them in The Freedom Formula: How to Put Soul in Your Business and Money in Your Bank so that others could tap into her wisdom.
Today her publishing company, Love Your Life Publishing, offers nearly 15 books per year. The firm’s most recent releases are her books The Freedom Formula, a No. 1 Amazon.com best seller, and Conscious Entrepreneurs. In addition to publishing, she also coaches entrepreneurial authors through the entire process of turning their book idea into reality with her Get Your Book Done program.
When not writing, publishing or coaching inspired authors, Christine is working on a number of products and services to support spiritually-oriented, conscious entrepreneurs– including her award-winning email newsletter the Conscious Business Connection, her group coaching program the Conscious Business Circle, and her upcoming live event, The Freedom Formula Experience, January 22-25, 2009 in Los Angeles.
Christine’s commitment is to “help conscious entrepreneurs integrate their spiritual wisdom with tangible business strategies so they experience a business (and life) filled with purpose, passion and profit.”
She lives in Pennsylvania with her husband, David, and their daughter Janet, and enjoys being a work-at-home mom.
For more information, see www.thefreedomformula.com
