Archive for July, 2010

Watch this. This is magical.

I’m not into skateboarding, but the camera work is beautiful and also, because a lot of it is in slo-mo, you get to appreciate the magic that is happening – which would be too quick to see in real life. Plus it’s set to a great track.

But my point is – this is the magic that is possible when you make a commitment to your passion and LIVE IT.

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Now go forth, and do something.

My friend the lovely Becca is organising the Green Area at the Watusi Festival, a unique, small scale event happening just outside of Cardiff on the 10^th-12^th September. The theme of the Green Area is “urban permaculture”; she is looking for people to contribute and get involved, bring a project, spread the word about it, do a talk or workshop or even just leave some of information and leaflets to display.

She’s also looking for people who may be able to donate or lend some plants for the festival! Please help if you can.

Becca can be contacted on 07800 870095 or bex.red@gmail.com. She’s on a permaculture course in Albania though from 22^nd July – 5^th August (cause that’s how she rocks, our Becca!), during which time you can get in touch with her colleague Sarah instead, on 07830 089580.

Here’s a link to the printable pdf document with more information – do please feel free to pass on and circulate as widely as you can.

Thank you. You rock.

“Cities are not the problem – they are the solution. Cities are alive and should be treated that way”
~ from the engaged ecology mini manifesto.

What’s the space where you work like? Is it an office somewhere? A home office? The kitchen table? I’ve just checked out a few inspirational workspaces (not all offices). My favourite at the moment is Steve Jobs’ when he was starting out:

I’m attracted to the minimalism in that photo. It looks clear, and easy, and simple. Focused.

Ok, it was posed for a photoshoot – but he still didn’t have any furniture! I doubt his office looks like that now… and there’s something to say about a decent setup if only for your back and shoulders. All this aside, this photo keeps me inspired when I have “bleh” days.

For your viewing pleasure, here are nine workspaces where famous people get things done. (Including the photo above.) In the real world, I woudn’t work on the floor with just a light and a stereo. However, I would love a shed in the garden like Martin Amis has…

I’ve been feeling tired lately. At first I didn’t really take any notice – I *am* being incredibly busy at the moment, after all, I’m bound to be a bit tired – but eventually, with some gentle nagging from lbf [lovely boyfriend], I realised that I was complaining of being exhausted every evening, and having pretty severe energy drops during the day as well.

So off I went last week for a  consultation with my friend and naturopathic nutritionist Emma “Healthy”Jones.

Turns out I’m a bit anaemic, so I’ve got a liquid iron supplement to drink, and instructions to eat plenty of broccoli and spinach. The high iron content in spinach is not a myth, by the way. Emma has set me right, contrary to what I’ve been telling people lately (I’m hereby attempting to set the record straight).

As part of the consultation, Emma checked on my water intake. Now I *know* I should be aiming for 2L a day. In practice though, I can be incredibly lazy especially when I am working and lost in my flow, and so my actual intake varies from practically nil to over the recommended 4 pints a day, with the zero intake being a not infrequent occurrence.

You should drink plenty of water because it’s good for you. Everybody knows that, right? Right. So I asked Emma what happens, exactly, when you don’t take in enough water?

Well… (this is only a quick summary, but I have urged Emma to blog about this), first of all you can’t absorb water-soluble vitamins like VitB and VitC. So your liver can’t function properly to produce hormones (because it needs them as part of the process), and this affects your mood (not in a good way, let me tell you!). Then the body takes the water it needs from the food we eat, which means that our digestion goes sluggish and inefficient, and we put on weight. Also, we cease to recognise thirst signals and mistake them for hunger, which also contributes to eating up to 60% more than we need to. (60%!! Holy shit!!) Now if that wasn’t scary enough, being dehydrated means we have lower energy and poor concentration, and apparently the brain can shrink up to 40% (hello, mental image of my shrivelled up little pea of a brain). And last but possibly not least, the dark circles and puffiness that appear under our eyes? Yup, you guessed it. Lack of water again.

So I don’t know about you but that sure is a motivation for me! Instead of telling me “drink more water, it’s good for you”, just tell me “drink more water otherwise you’ll be moody and get fat” and I’ll be on it like a shot.

I kid  you not, since last week I have been drinking water with religious zeal.

Wherein I, very uncharacteristically, talk about beauty, as in beauty therapy treatments. But really, I’m talking about self-esteem and about marketing.

For those of you who don’t know what threading involves, it’s a method of facial hair removal. It’s all the rage these days, but 5 years ago there were hardly any places that did it in Cardiff. Normally my awareness of beauty techniques is pretty low (so something may have been around for 20 years and I probably wouldn’t have noticed) but I did look into it at the time for a friend who wanted her eyebrows threaded, not waxed, and had only found one place.

At that time, when I walked into that beauty salon to enquire about prices and whether they would do home visits (my friend was housebound), the first thing the owner (a very glamorous woman in her forties) said was: “You’ve come to have your eyebrows done, yes?” as if they were some kind of furry caterpillars rampaging across my face and had to be controlled immediately. I refrained from covering my eyebrows with my index fingers as I answered that no, I like my eyebrows as they are (dubious pout from her) and that I was enquiring for a friend.

Now beauty booths that do threading (and nails and other stuff) have sprung up in the middle of the shopping centres – ArchAngels in Saint David’s, something else, even maybe another ArchAngels? in Saint David’s 2. And I had a similar experience to the one 5 years ago, in Saint David’s 2. A plump lady armed with [insert name of beauty booth here] leaflets stopped me as I was on my way to Lakeland to buy edible glitter for my blissings. She told me I should have my eyebrows done, it only takes 5 minutes, it’s pretty cheap (quoted price at me), blah blah blah, and it would lift my face and I would look prettier.

Now I have to say, CHEERS very much. (“Yeah you look ok love, but you could do better.”)
I’m being told repeatedly (well ok… twice) that my eyebrows need doing. I DON’T CARE!

The truth is, I totally do care. It sucks, as a marketing ploy. But it works. You start by denting your potential client’s self image just so you can announce that you can fix it for them. And somewhere, even though I am loathe to admit it, a small part of me wonders whether they are actually right.

Maybe my eyebrows don’t need doing. It’s just sales. People’s eyebrows are easier to spot and comment on than nails for example. (If that random woman had accosted me and grabbed my hands to examine my nails, I would have either hit her or run away.) Then once I’m in the booth having my eyebrows done, she can check my nails and upsell me a manicure or somesuch. I get it.

Maybe my eyebrows do need doing. But hold on… what intangible benefit am I supposed to get out of it? What does “lift my face” mean anyway? I have a mental image of attaching a bunch of helium balloons to my face, perhaps with pegs.

No, seriously, are we talking facelift kind of lift? As in looking younger? People think I’m in my early twenties as it is – I’m 31 – and I don’t need to look any younger, thank you very much. Clients are just not going to take me seriously.

Are we talking happy kind of lift? If you’re frowning and grumpy no amount of eyebrow threading will make you look joyful. I’ll choose smiling over having my facial hair tampered with. Even though I once overheard an old lady on the bus say that she never smiles because it creates wrinkles.

[An aside: that being said, I did have a part of my face de-haired once. In my younger days, when I believed what other (random, ill-informed) people told me about my appearance. A boy asked me to have my upper lip waxed and I complied. Looking back, that was one of the silliest mistakes I have ever made, and I would like to reach back and give myself a good shake and a stern talking to. I’m brunette. I have a ‘tache. Live with it, or piss off.]

Moral one: thanks, beauty industry, but I don’t think so. There’s got to be a better way to do marketing than to knock someone down just to be able to pick them up and make them feel better again. If that were a relationship, that would be abusive.

Moral two: when I’m 40 and I need to look younger, I’ll have my eyebrows threaded. Until then, I’m not even going to bother thinking about it (which I confess I have been up to now, just once I a while… “should I? should I not?”). And this has just freed up a surprisingly consequent amount of mental space, which I can now use to… erm… dodge raindrops, coo over my newborn godchild, blog post about marketing a bit more, and about how much you need to drink water (these last two are actually coming soon).

All in all a resounding success, methinks.

For those of you to whom my previous post (account of the recent WEEU conference) is of little to no interest, I present…

Just spotted these over at http://9gag.com/

Life is magic, isn’t it?

Happy Monday, what’s left of it. Have a most excellent week.

This is a really quite a long blog post, pretty different from my usual ones, and will primarily be of interest to aspiring and existing women entrepreneurs. It will be followed closely by a “general interest” one.

Last Tuesday I attended the Women’s Entrepreneurship in the European Union conference at the Atrium, the beautiful University of Glamorgan building in central Cardiff. (I was writing this to post on Friday but in the meantime my laptop died and was brought back to life!)

The WEEU project is “a two-year project focussed on the  research, design and development of innovative approaches to learning, new teaching methods and materials, and associated support for aspiring and existing women entrepreneurs.” It’s been led by the Women’s Entrepreneurship Hub from the Centre for Enterprise at the Uni of Glam, and has brought together higher education institutions, chambers of commerce, and a bunch of private enterprises from Wales, France and Lithuania. It involved running free week-long summer schools for women entrepreneurs in each country last summer, and a load of research and interviews with aspiring and existing women entrepreneurs.

The day started with a keynote address by Jane Hutt, Assembly Member and Welsh Minister for Business and Budget (and also Director of the Vale Women’s Business Network and ex director of Chwarae Teg which supports the economic development of women in Wales). She highlighted the importance of supporting women entrepreneurs, who have such an important role to play in the communities, the economy, and for children and families. Women have different values, issues and priorities, and Jane mentioned as a striking example how Bjork has become a venture capitalist with an Icelandic investment bank run by two other women to help regenerate the economy. Their values when investing are:

• risk awareness,
• profit with principles (social and environmental responsibility),
• emotional capital (inspiring, mentoring, encouraging and supporting),
• straight talking (we really like this!),
• independence and unbiased advice.

Leading on from there and developing the theme that the female model of undertaking business is quite different from that of traditional male type businesses, Christine Atkins (head of the Women’s Entrepreneurship Hub) then reported back on some of the results of the research carried out in Wales, France and Lithuania. There was a considerable amount of variability between the countries – which led to some very useful cross-pollination of ideas and techniques – and between individual women of course, but also some common traits. These were grouped into the following broad themes, which will inform the learning styles in training and the development of teaching materials (and reminded me of some of the themes in Lynne Franks’ Seed Network):

• business planning, which is seen as necessary but very dry and formal. How can women unleash their creativity and talent to write a meaningful business plan?
• creativity and innovation – they need to be fostered and encouraged.
• social entrepreneurship, a value which seems to be more important for women than for men.
• work-life balance: one of the key challenges. Women see entrepreneurship as a flexible alternative form of employment, but it often becomes all time consuming, especially in the early years of starting a business.
• sustainability and sustainable development, like green issues and being ethical in business. (On that note, check out Positive Trading, a new group set up for business people who include positivity, equity, well-being, responsibility, fairness, ethics and mutual support in their business thinking.)
• mentoring and work shadowing.

The day continued with a presentation of some case studies. One of those was a video interview with Carrie of Carrie Elspeth (handmade designer jewellery company based in Cowbridge, near Cardiff). Carrie talked about how invaluable having a mentor was to her as she started and developed her business – someone she got on well with, who she could share and discuss ideas with, who was in business themselves and was able to provide support in the form of advice and guidance for tricky business decisions, and provide perspective on the market. In addition, he was able to provide emotional support, which is not to be sneezed at because setting up in business has its really hard moments! She summarised her business mentor’s role by saying she could have got there on her own, but he helped her get there a lot quicker. The message she wished to pass on to aspiring and existing women entrepreneurs is:

• have a business plan!
• mix with positive motivated people, particularly people who are in business and who are doing well.

This last point is why watching the case studies was so inspiring, because Carrie (and the other featured women) are 10-11 years into their businesses, and flourishing. When you are starting out and in the first few years I have found you tend to hang out with people who are at about the same stage (and it’s great to have the peer support), but it’s such a boost to see and learn from people who are soaring. I really believe that while entrepreneurs at Carrie’s stage still have a need for a more experienced business mentor, they could also bring some fantastic support and inspiration to a “younger” (in terms of business setup and development) entrepreneur, as a mentor themselves.

There were other case studies presented (Bethan Hughes of Healing Harp, Rebecca Exley Groundwater Ltd), but the other one that really stood out for me was the interview with one of the directors of Barefoot Studio, Cowbridge. The points that stood out for me and which I wrote down were:

• Business planning: what’s your exit plan? I’d never even thought of this before, but it was a real lightbulb moment for me. Where do you want to be, and what are you trying to achieve? Do you want to grow your business to sell on? Are you planning to franchise? What are your long-term objectives (even if you’re not planning to exit your own business)? You need to have the end point in mind to know what steps to take to get there.
• Have a business advisor: they will help you with business planning and forecasts, and also with having courage in the tough times.
• Have support around you – emotional support, not just business support.
• Network with other women: you have to believe in yourself and in your model of business. It’s lonely working alone and when things go wrong you have to have support.
• For the first 3 years you will probably work the most hours for little rewards, so you’ve GOT to be passionate and enjoy what you do. Also, it helps if you can fudge the boundaries between work and life – if work is really fun, you will feel less that it’s taking from you the whole time.
• That being said, make sure you also build in downtime and holidays.

After lunch and some networking, Christine Atkinson and Marilia Angrove from the Women’s Entrepreneurship Hub presented the structure and some of the content of last year’s summer school for women entrepreneurs, then the French team Francoise Van Weddingen and Antoine El Hage fed back their findings and case studies from the research carried out in France. Finally, the participants from last year’s summer school in Cardiff were present to feed back on what it had meant to them, how it had helped, and where they are now.

The WEEU project is coming to the end of its two years now; a new funding bid has been submitted, with the objective of developing national mentoring events and national and international customised social networking sites. Thanks to Christine Atkinson and Marilia Angove for putting on such a successful, informative and inspiring day… The next event will be on 16th September in Paris, and will see the launch of the WEEU consortium as well as the website, containing all the case studies and a wealth of information for new and existing women entrepreneurs. In the meantime, you can check out the WEEU Facebook group.

Funnily enough, I was going to go to the south of France for a holiday around then. I can see myself arranging travel around the dates of that conference…