Starting Over after Divorce

Just so we are clear, I’ve never been married so I’ve never been divorced. I wrote this article for a client who changed their mind at the last minute and decided they didn’t want to use my services. I’ve managed to find a home for pretty much all of the articles except for this one. I figure I haven’t blogged in awhile so why not post it here. Please enjoy. And to all of you who are struggling to get through a divorce you have both my condolences and well wishes.

Also, you are free to reprint this article on your own websites and newsletters as long as the author bio section remains intact and the links remain active.

Dealing With The Expectations of Others

My goal this month was to try and post at least once per week but life this month has been interesting to say the least. I have to bend my life around the schedule of a 90 year old woman and it hasn’t been an easy feat. I’m used to coming and going and doing as I please so suddenly having to schedule my activities around another person has been something of an adjustment. I still don’t have the hang of it.

Anyway, I didn’t want the month to end without getting in another post. So here I am at Border’s Books enjoying a coffee drink and freezing my buns off. Border’s now has free Wi-Fi but I suspect that to keep people from loitering and drinking all their Wi-Fi juice they crank up the a/c. Every time I come here it’s like 30 below freezing. I’m actually wearing a thick sweater. But I won’t complain. It’s free internet at my favorite bookstore which allows me to do what I love to do which is to write for my blog.

Unfortunately, all of my first draft posts are at home on my desktop computer so today I’m winging it. What’s a good topic? Oh I know. Dealing with other people’s expectations of me.

The Secret to Getting Out of Hell

One television show that I enjoy watching is the Ghost Whisperer. If you’ve never seen it or heard of it before, it is a show starring Jennifer Love Hewitt as Melinda Gordon, a woman who can see ghosts. In the show, people who die fail to crossover and end up stuck on Earth. Melinda helps these Earth bound spirits, as she calls them, resolve their issues so they can be at peace. The show always makes me cry. I don’t really know why. It just does.

One episode of the show really touched me. The owner of a mortuary was being tortured by his past. The man had fallen on hard times and when his furnace broke he was unable to get it fixed. To save his business, he told families that he cremated the bodies of their loved ones but in reality he dumped them into a pond in the woods. The ghosts of those people were trapped on Earth because of their anger over what he did to them.

When we meet the mortician in the show he is dying of cancer and is terrified. He can feel the presence of the ghosts waiting for him to die so they can punish him for what he did. Eventually, he does die and as he expected the ghosts start torturing him.

Craigslist Job Scam – Fake Job Offers

This morning I received an email from a long time friend of mine who wanted me to check out an email she received from a job she applied for on Craigslist. Yes folks, it’s Craigslist again. She knew I had had trouble last year with a scam company posting false jobs to collect personal information for resell to spammers. Well more misguided souls are doing the same thing but with a twist.

When you go to Craigslist job board now, the first thing you will notice is that they have posted a warning about scammers advertising fake jobs for affiliate money. I guess it’s gotten really bad over there. But I’m not surprised. All it takes is one fool making money doing something evil before a host of copycats follow in their footsteps hoping to do the same.

When I looked at the email she forwarded to me, I knew immediately it was a scam.

Thank God It’s 2010

Well, another year has passed taking with it the first decade of the new millennium. I can’t say that I’m sad to see it go. 2009 was particularly challenging for me as it was for millions of others. The new century started off with so much promise. It’s a shame that its first decade ended so disappointingly.

But I will not complain. Instead, I choose to appreciate those hard times. I’ve learned in the last month that while good times bring us the most joy, bad times bring us the greatest opportunities for growth. By experiencing circumstances that were less than ideal, I learned what I didn’t want. And learning what I didn’t want helped me figure out the kind of life I wanted to create which in turned has led to a refining of my goals.

Life is Supposed to Feel Good

For as long as I could remember, I’ve felt bad about life. It started in childhood with physical abuse by a parent. Later, I had the bad luck to crossed paths with two sexual predators resulting in molestation and rape. I learned, pretty early on, to console myself with food so by my teen years I was overweight. When I became old enough to work, I got a job which introduced me to another way to self medicate myself; spending money. By the time I was twenty-five, I had declared bankruptcy twice.

On the surface it would seem that feeling bad about life in general and myself in particular was justified. After all, if I hadn’t suffered abuse as a child or had been taken advantage of by sexual predators or hadn’t been ridiculed or didn’t get into fights with people or had been more responsible with money then my life wouldn’t be in such a state of disrepair. It might even be downright perfect and I would have nothing to feel bad about. Right?

Hello World – Six Months Later

A lot has happened since I last posted. The biggest change has been in my location. I am now living in Florida, though I’m not sure I’m going to stay here. I moved here to help out a family member but now that family member has decided she doesn’t want to live in Florida anymore which has put me into kind of a bind.

I’ll be perfectly honest and say I didn’t want to come here. Mainly because I had a premonition that something like this was going to happen. But instead of heeding the warning, I wrote the feeling off as a fear of change, something that I struggle with more and more as I get older.

But I’d be lying if I said that moving here was a total fail. In fact, I think in about a year I will probably say that being in Florida was the best thing that ever happened to me. Because of the challenges I’ve run into down here, namely not getting a job despite taking my own advice, I’ve been forced out of my comfort zone.

Get a Job by Thinking Like an Entrepreneur

The news is grim. So far over four million jobs have been lost since the start of the recession. People are being ousted from their jobs at rates comparable to the depression era with some predicting a whopping 9.4% unemployment rate for 2009.

With so many people flooding the market, competition is fierce; even for jobs that don’t pay well. Getting a job today will require a new way of thinking of things. It will require you to think like an entrepreneur.

Whether you realize it or not, you are an entrepreneur. Instead of selling candles or financial services, you are selling the knowledge and skills you have developed over the years to a business that needs them. And instead of doing contracted work for multiple clients like the average freelancer, you devote the bulk of your time serving only one client for several years.