Dates for workshops still TBD but feel free to contact me for more information. If you’re more interested in a one-on-one work arrangement definitely shot me an email. I don’t plan to have a lot of individual clients.

In the meantime enjoy the excerpt from the book!

Excerpt from The Right-Brain Business Plan: A Creative, Visual Map for Success
By Jennifer Lee
www.rightbrainbusinessplan.com

Does This Sound Like You?
You know you’re a right-brain entrepreneur if you respond with a resounding “yes!” to the following questions:
Do you hate the idea of writing a business plan but know you need one?
Do numbers numb you out?
Do words like business plan, cash flow, and balance sheet make your skin crawl?
Would you rather have an MFA than an MBA?
Do you have a big vision for your business but struggle with seeing it through?
Do you prefer colors, images, and feelings to spreadsheets, tables, and templates?
Do you want to make a positive impact with your business but avoid the business aspects of your job?
Do you feel that planning is boring or daunting, or that it gets in the way of the “real work”?
Are you turned off by the formality and nitty-gritty detail of traditional business plans?
Do you believe there’s got to be a better way to run your business?

You are not alone! I hear clients, workshop participants, and blog readers answer yes to questions like these all the time. Sure, your feathers may get ruffled when you hear the letters ROI, but that doesn’t mean you can’t artfully run a business.

Why a Right-Brain Approach to Business Planning?

Typically, we think of business planning as very much a left-brain activity, and yes, the left brain certainly does play a key role in the planning process, since it is geared for logical, analytical, critical thinking. The left brain is a rock star at solving problems, sequencing steps, and hashing out the details, all great attributes when it comes to testing a plan and carrying out the steps to make that plan happen.

The challenge is when left-brain thinking comes too early in the visioning and planning process and kills the party with its questioning, judgment, and need for every single piece of the puzzle to make absolute sense before taking that first step. This limits your thinking; good ideas are quashed before they’ve even had a chance to form. You get analysis paralysis. Unfortunately, this can leave you feeling frustrated, stuck, and without a plan to speak of. Sound familiar?

Fortunately, as a creative person, you’re naturally gifted with right-brain intuition, imagination, and innovation. But this isn’t about left-brain bashing. In fact, the left brain plays an important role in different parts of your planning process. What we want to avoid is letting your left brain hijack the situation.

When you approach business planning with your right brain first, you free your mind to see creative options, explore, and find patterns and purpose. You allow yourself to dream big and to connect emotionally with your vision. When you begin with your authentic vision, you’re so much better equipped to deal with all the other “stuff.”

Yes, it’s important to know the details and understand the numbers, but if you start from that point, you force yourself into a box and may not even get your plan finished because you become frustrated or blocked. You can always ask an expert about how to read a profit and loss statement, but you can only ask yourself about what matters most to you and your business. If you start with your vision and values, the details will follow.

Excerpted from the book The Right-Brain Business Plan © 2011 by Jennifer Lee. Printed with permission of New World Library, Novato, CA. www.newworldlibrary.com. Download the free illustrated poster of The Right-Brain Entrepreneur Badge of Honor and play sheets from the book at www.rightbrainbusinessplan.com.

What I do
Before most meetings, interviews included I tend to make mindmaps to make the information I need easy to access. One glance and I get a cue as to what is going on and why. For interviews I create 2 separate maps, one map contains the meeting details and the second one is usually just a bunch of questions that I want to ask. I usually put more interview questions than I need and check off the ones I want to ask either before the interview or during the process since sometimes the questions I have get answered during the process. No point in asking the same question twice.

The Interview MindMap

The Questions MindMap

Get the files:

Customize and use freely. I add relevant information as needed to make it work. This map can be modified to accommodate other kinds of meetings as well. Download MindManager from Mindjet or use whatever mindmapping software you prefer.

You can look at my post A Simple Lesson in Visual Thinking to get a brief introduction.

RSAnimate, adapted from Dan Pink’s talk about his book Drive.

David McCandless: The Beauty of Data Visualization

SXSW 2010: Dan Roam on Visual Thinking from Teehan+Lax on Vimeo.

Have a favorite visual thinking book, video or article? Tell me about it!

© iStockPhoto/kertlis

The books I couldn’t put down in 2010

1. Self-Promotion for Introverts: The Quiet Guide to Getting Ahead by Nancy Ancowitz – as an introvert this book has been a great reference and affirmation for what works for me and what doesn’t when it comes to promoting myself. I learned I was already doing alot to honor my own style. Not necessarily the way an extrovert would but one that works for me. I wrote several posts about my experiences with Nancy both as an instructor for self-promotion and presentation skills for introverts.
   Below are the posts: –
   • Self Promotion for Introverts as presented by Nancy Ancowitz
   • What I learned during “Presentation Skills for Introverts
   • Lessons learned: Self-Promotion for Introverts

   Follow her on Twitter for Self-Promotion for Introverts® tips – @NancyAncowitz

2. The Female Brain by Louann Brizendin – in my post “What makes women unique? “The Female Brain” reveals many secrets.” I discussed what I learned from reading this book. It’s funny as a woman you’d mistakenly think you know everything about your brain but there is a lot that science can teach about why and how we do the things we do. This book answers some of those questions.
3. Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith – a solid overview of social media and why it’s more about relationship building than the tools you use.
4. Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow by Elizabeth Lesser – Sharon Salzberg, is one of America’s leading insight meditation teachers and spirituality writers said it best when she said that the book
   

   “bravely and beautifully explores one of the most compelling questions of life: How do we emerge from suffering and challenge with real, encompassing wisdom and love? Broken Open is personal, pragmatic, and enlightening.”

   Broken Open presents some great questions to ponder: Do we give-up when bad things happen? Stay angry forever? Or learn and grow from the experience. The book is filled with stories. Yes, some tragic but how the individuals or families chose to live in spite of what happened is a testimony to what the human spirit can achieve. We can’t choose what fate throws at us but we can choose our reaction to it. One doesn’t have to live with the “why me” syndrome. Be like a Phoenix and rise from the ashes. Shit happens regardless of our best intentions.

5. Unfolding the Napkin: The Hands-On Method for Solving Complex Problems with Simple Pictures by Dan Roam the follow-up to The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures is a great book to learn how to solve problems visually. It is a workshop in a book. You just have to spend the time doing the exercises. Even if you think can’t draw it doesn’t matter. I plan to re-read both of Dan’s books in 2011 just to reinforce what I learned.

It’s no secret I read a lot. I have run out of space on my bookshelf at home. The next step is to go digital I suppose but I think I would miss the feel and smell of the real thing. I probably only read about 5% fiction books. In 2010, I only read 3 – The Host: A Novel by Stephanie Meyer, An Echo in the Bone: A Novel (Outlander) by Diana Gabaldon and Breaking Dawn (The Twilight Saga) by Stephanie Meyer (The movie adaptation will probably suck given it’s PG 13 rating. As my 1st and only Twilight book it was better than expected).

What’s on my reading list for 2011

• The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t
• Idea Mapping: How to Access Your Hidden Brain Power, Learn Faster, Remember More, and Achieve Success in Business
• Buyology: Truth and Lies About Why We Buy
• Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently
• How We Decide
• Under Her Skin: How Girls Experience Race in America (Live Girls)
• Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
• What’s Your Story? Storytelling to Move Markets, Audiences, People, and Brands
• The Creative Habit: Learn It and Use It for Life

 

So what’s your top 5 books for 2010? Knowing myself as I do, my reading list will definitely get longer. Happy reading!




]]> http://shelley-ann.com/2010/12/my-top-5-books-for-2010/feed/ 0 http://shelley-ann.com/2009/11/the-journey-of-writing-a-business-plan-part-2/ http://shelley-ann.com/2009/11/the-journey-of-writing-a-business-plan-part-2/#comments Thu, 12 Nov 2009 06:53:00 +0000 Shelley http://shelley-ann.com/2009/11/the-journey-of-writing-a-business-plan-part-2/

On Monday I wrote about creating my business plan. The next hurdle for me is figuring out what services to offer. Sure, I could offer a ton of services but I’ll get better results overall if I focus. My business plan is created using scrapbook paper, stickers and clippings from magazines.

I currently have services listed on my site but I want to fine tune my offerings. Trying to be all things to all people is not my goal. Being a jack of all trades…master of none isn’t good for the wallet. I would bet that most generalists would agree with me with few exceptions.

A lot of business books talk about how hard it is for people to pick a target market for their services. This I can say with honestly is totally true. You do feel like you are giving up something. But that is a scarcity mentality. You can’t service every single market.

Everyone does not need your services.

So I’m working on narrowing my focus and redefining my strategy. Having it all out of my head and on paper makes the task of work on my business plan that much easier.

Growing a consulting practice without some kind of plan would have been  a waste of time.




]]> http://shelley-ann.com/2009/11/the-journey-of-writing-a-business-plan-part-2/feed/ 0 http://shelley-ann.com/2009/11/the-journey-of-writing-a-business-plan/ http://shelley-ann.com/2009/11/the-journey-of-writing-a-business-plan/#comments Mon, 09 Nov 2009 05:24:00 +0000 Shelley http://shelley-ann.com/2009/11/the-journey-of-writing-a-business-plan/

I recently finished writing my business plan. I figured it was time. I’ve been procrastinating about it for ages. But you can’t run a business if you don’t know where you stand or where you are going.

I’ve tried several approaches to creating a business plan – templates, kits etc. and none of it worked. Then I discovered the Right-Brain Business plan by Jennifer Lee. It’s a kit that offers the reader an e-book plus visualization about their business. I found this route of planning much easier that the left brain approach I’d tried before. Just using numbers and statistics just doesn’t cut it. Not that this right-brain approach ignores the numbers. It doesn’t. You still have to figure out the cost of doing business but that’s after you’ve done all the creative thinking about who you are, what your business is and what your unique selling point it.

To learn more about the right-brain business plan visit Artizen Coaching.




]]> http://shelley-ann.com/2009/11/the-journey-of-writing-a-business-plan/feed/ 0 http://shelley-ann.com/2009/08/a-simple-lesson-in-visual-thinking/ http://shelley-ann.com/2009/08/a-simple-lesson-in-visual-thinking/#comments Tue, 25 Aug 2009 00:11:40 +0000 Shelley http://shelley-ann.com/?p=357 Thanks to Harry the Hipster, Kermit the Frog gets a lesson in visual thinking.

Harry the Hipster just did a great job explaining to Kermit what visual thinking is. But here again are the steps in the visual thinking process:

1. Collecting information – doing research in any form that works for you.
2. Seeing a pattern within that information and creating clusters of data
3. Composition – arranging items to form a unified whole
4. Translation – defining a result that people can understand

I’m planning to do a series of posts on various visual thinking techniques but until then I’ve put together a few resources so you can learn more about it.

Resources

Blogs
• Digital Roam – by management consultant Dan Roam who is the author of The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
• Journal – by Scott McCloud, an amazing comic artist, author of the book Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art and the creator of The Google Chrome Web Comic
• gapingvoid: cartoons drawn on the back of business cards – by Hugh MacLeod, and author of the book Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity
Books
• The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, 2nd edition – Edward Tufte
• The New Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain – Betty Edwards
• Visual Thinking – Rudolf Arnheim



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