#womensbusiness

So our gender specific birthright is pretty powerful in the workplace should we choose to invoke it. We can be achievement driven-yet it is tempered with compassion. We can utilize a voice influx to command immediate attention. We can have the good fortune of being underestimated. We can be more physically engaging-if such is our choice-and if not, we can require very precise boundaries. We can be perceived as less intimidating by colleagues-which can result in more collaboration. All of this stuff gives us a giant advantage in business…and life. Following-I will elaborate on some of these workplace  advantages& how to use them.

#ReleaseYourInnerShark aka: #WhatGlassCeiling

release your inner shark

Did u know that we have 154 genomes in common with a species of shark?  I mean, isn’t that totally crazy that sharks are our distant biological cousins?So, to level the business playing field, COAFSE suggests that u let loose your inner shark:

  1. “Yep.  I probably did that.”  being offended is for novices.  Your inner shark doesn’t care what some guppy has to say about her.  Neither should u.  We spend a lot of time feeling offended and defending ourselves.  Time to stop.
  2. Grow more accustomed to failure.  sharks don’t worry too  much about mistakes.  When on the hunt, they make lots of miscalculations about what they can catch and what can fit in their mouths, etc.  Unlike many other life forms-they don’t let themselves get stuck trying to fix mistakes, they just move in a forward direction towards the next opportunity.  Time for us to do the same.
  3. Have sexual energy be part of your everyday life.  its sorta like the difference between playing checkers and chess.  When u have an awareness of your sexuality, u get a lot more fun and control and interestingness out of walking around or negotiating a deal or brainstorming in a meeting.  Sex is a natural point of awareness for every homosapien and women spend a lot of time  acting more like a deer and less like a shark in the boardroom.  Don’t be prey.  Just stay in control & get your way.  Added bonus: when u r aware of your sexual energy, u can shut down transgressions in a millisecond.  “Deer” just tend to pretend they didn’t hear it. Want to wake up your inner shark?  Buy my SharkBait.  Very nice stuff.  Warning: it’s addictive.
  4. Don’t worry about  rejection.  Business rejection is a blessing.  It helps u define the shape of the deal and if there is simply no deal to be had, it lets u know to move on to bluer water.
  5. Seize on opportunity.  When there is blood in the water-OPEN WIDE and feast as that business deal gets DONE.

we are sharks-feel us bite

#caring4others

So, as u may have gathered-i know that women are absolutely amazing. I am fortunate to know heaps of lovely, kind, wonderful men…but c’mon-its all about women. Without us, humankind doesn’t exist. We take our jobs as women very seriously and frequently compromised our own financial futures and emotional well being to caretake others. Sometimes it requires that we voluntarily remove ourselves from the workplace to make it so. Oftentimes, the end result is that we are doing the work of two people and its time to get these nice men of ours to step up their game a bit…but since we know that the completely reliable way for change to occur is to change ourselves, here are 6 life hacks for helping to keep u sane as u make all the difference in the world to those u love.

  1. Just say “no” to the white noise.  Perhaps u are an expectant mother.  There will be a dim-witted Auntie who will be very happy to elaborate on her 30 hours of labor.  Just shut down the “dumb” quickly by sweetly asking: “Auntie, before u continue your story, consider whether or not it will be helpful or fear producing to me.”  This goes for all such…shall we loosely call it “advice”?  You will  have experts on broken bones and hernias and cancers before they have asked even a first question of u.  I’m gonna be honest here.  Your free time is about to go to zero.  U do not have time to humor thoughtless people.
  2. You are the caregiving general contractor.  There will be a lot of moving parts and your most important job is to be the project supervisor.  There will be doctors and tests and appointments and the person u r caregiving will be too sick, or young (or unborn)-so they will not be able to manage this most important bit.  Be meticulous with your record keeping.  I recommend setting up a different themed google calendar that u can share with stakeholders and also maintaining a spreadsheet with pertinent details.  Google sheets integrates nicely with all mobile devices.  Have all this information at hand for medical appointments.  Ask questions.  Research for ideas and best practices and options and be ready with those questions. Make your medical appointments a dialogue, not a monologue.
  3. Apologize to friends and loved ones in advance and solicit their help.  Explain that your time is ridiculously constrained and that will result in less interaction during this process…and ask if they can help.  Identify help that is actually useful to u and have a list of ideas for the folks best suited to the task of driving, meal prep, appointment setting, house chores, deadlines, baby sitting, dog walking…anything that lightens YOUR load. People who love u want to help.  It deepens your connections when u r able to both give AND receive from those whom u love.
  4. Take care of yourself FIRST.  Remember what  they tell u during air travel?  “Secure your own oxygen mask before attempting to help others.”  If u are too ill to assist, u have done the person u are caregiving a grave injustice.  U r cherished and if u fall ill, your dependent loved one will hurt even more and have many needs unmet.  Besides all the other stuff u have to do every day, u must sleep for at least 6 hours and take a daily shower, get half an hour of outdoor physical activity and eat healthy foods.
  5. Know when the gig is over.  Kids get older and people recover.  You have to be mindful of this and start transitioning responsibilities back to the caregiven. Being a long term caregiver is weird and we create a schedule and habits that are hard to change once we r no longer needed in that capacity.  Notice increasing skills and strength and task it with parts of your list.  Kids can make their own lunches.  A recovering ill person can organize their own medications.  Start putting the ball back in their court.
  6. We’re all here for such a short time.  Sometimes we are preceded in death.  Sometimes the person we are caregiving will not recover.  For me, this is the ultimate reason to serve another.  This depth of connection is unmatched.  The bond that is developed between a true dependent who has chosen u through nature or nurture to care for them when they cannot do as much for themselves is the highest calling.  If we are very lucky, we will find that depth of love will be returned to us in our time of need.

Now, if we are to put this in the context of working and entrepreneurism…things will probably be moving more slowly for u at this time due to time constraints.  Just make sure to be honest with your employer about the level of contribution u can make.  People are beautiful and kind.  If u choose to communicate early instead of trying to do it all and possibly fumbling the ball for your employer, u give them a chance to sort out how to meet the needs of the company and respect your situation.  Be brave and tell the truth. If u r an entrepreneur- think of this as your “thinking time.” Think about ideas in play or ways to improve upon systems  u r witnessing.  There is so much boringness during these times of intense caregiving.  Your adrenal system is wiped or u r anxious beyond measure or u r waiting for somebody to wake up or to be called for an appointment.  Anyhow-just keep half and eye open to possibilities for entrepreneurship.  One product i am developing came to fruition under these circumstances.  Every time u ask yourself why things are done a certain way- u r looking at a possible idea that can make the process better, easier, cheaper, safer, faster for the next person to walk in your shoes.

Protect Your IP

So, u need to ensure that u have a business identity that u can defend. It seemed like a crazy good idea at the time to secure a TLD like scuba.com and it worked for me for some time. I spent north of a million dollars a year to defend a my sweet little bouncing baby noun/verb/acronym.  Make life easier on yourself and find a weird made up term that gives u a giggle or two and then fight like hell to tie it up and own every square inch of it. So, i was thinking about all of this great advise, of course, when i selected my own word that i invented that meant absolutely nothing. ever. I added it to urban dictionary and facebook and bought the url and tied up twitter, facebook and insta with these five lovely letters. I am a giant fan of irony so i needed to secure a 5 letter acronym successfully…unlike the one i paid zillions for. So this was the birth of coafse. There are so many adept online tools now for securing your trademark and setting up your corporate structure that if you intend to do any commerce you should put those things in place. I have used a few of these but for coafse I decided on Swiftfiling because it looks like just about the most economical.  You don’t have to pay for the search features for trademark or for business name. State and federal agencies will have databases that you can access to do the searches yourself and save some money and it’s kind of a fundamental research piece for selecting the name in the first place. I still recommend a terrestrial website because this is your opportunity to optimize your pages for organic viability for search.  Organic is codeword for free and that’s a good price to pay. Your option is to pay a ton of money to Bing or Google (alphabet)- to have your company turn up in search results. For the coafse website platform-I have selected word press. They have a few different versions of the product & the one I have selected is the business platform which allows for e-commerce. I particularly love word press because it’s easy to deploy-there is even a mobile app that makes it easy to add content. Lastly-since it’s blog format and it’s easy for others to leave comments-I have enabled that feature so I can get feedback on each chapter and modify as necessary. To prevent spam-I have deployed captcha at the point of comment contributions. My goal through this process will be to choose simple tools and have full transparency to make it easy for the next person to bring their project across the finish line. Despite  my opening rant-I still feel really lucky to have the url  Scuba..com.  it’s a pretty unusual acronym that means absolutely one thing. Despite language barriers-it is a pretty universal word.  and there’s no plural version. Some of my other companies have equally cool names and a lot of this is because i think you have to have a tiny bit of a crush on the name you give your business. It’s sort of like naming your kids-you want to have that sound hit your heart hard every time you hear it. So make sure you fall in love with the name u ascribe to your bouncing baby business.   Love, #coafse

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