One of my clients recently added posting on his Twitter account to my contract.  I love social media and am excited to add to my “bag of tricks.”  But when I started hanging out on Twitter I just couldn’t see the point to it.  Honestly it just felt like being in a huge room full of people all talking at the same time.

Luckily I have a FANTASTIC business coach, Laurie Foley, who shared a webinar she created called “What the Flock is Twitter?  Twitter for Total Newbies.”  Laurie’s class is a wonderful introduction to Twitter.  She walks you through starting your account then explains how to communicate in Twitterese.  I’ve heard the word “hash tag” for years in reference to Twitter but it wasn’t until watching Laurie’s webinar that I finally understood what it meant.  (In case you’re wondering:  a hash tag is a # followed by a string of letters, such as #nativebees.  It serves as a grouping for related posts.  When you click on the hash tag in someone’s “tweet,” or post on Twitter, it will open up all the tweets that have that same hash tag.)

The best part of the class for me is Laurie’s 3-2-1 method for using Twitter:  Each day post at least three things, find two more people to follow, and help create one new pair by introducing two people on Twitter.

If you’re thinking about utilizing Twitter in your business and want to learn more about how it works, check out Laurie’s free class.    You can watch the recorded webinar with slides on your computer, or download the audio to listen on the go.  There is also a downloadable resource page with important Twitter-related links.

For more incentive on why Twitter can be valuable for your business, check out Chris Brogan’s 50 Ideas on Using Twitter for Business.

Update:  I’ve been using Twitterrific to manage the different Twitter accounts I update and have found that just scanning through the streams every once in awhile has dramatically increased my understanding of the culture of Twitter.  I still find myself wishing there was a “like” button (I’m a big Facebook fan), but I no longer feel like I’m in a room full of yelling people.

There’s a first step in all learning, and I’m taking my first RSS feed step right now. There are five tabs open right now on my browser, all offering to tell me how to set up my RSS feed.

I took a look at this RSS Workshop and just about gave up before I began!  If you want to know everything there is to know about RSS, this is the site for you!

I was hopeful when I found this site by Digital Inspiration, but it doesn’t tell me how to set up an RSS on my WordPress site.

I refined my search a few times and finally found this Feedburner Setup post on Thesis Theme Tools.  Whew!  A few quick and easy steps and now I have an RSS feed on NatureObservation.com – Yay! 

I have about a four-five hour window of patience and calm when working on computers. After that my brain starts to melt and I want to destroy the object of my attention. It doesn’t matter if I’m having a good day or a bad day, by the end of five hours I melt.

What the computer sees after five hours.

This is something I discovered about myself a couple months ago yet I continue plugging away at the computer through lunch and into my afternoon “break” time. I’ve got this crazy mental script that tells me if I don’t work myself into exhaustion then I’m not doing anything worthwhile and will fail at everything. Does this sound familiar?

My goal was to start a new habit today, to get back on track with living a life that is aligned with my values (like the value of doing work that energizes me, and not to the point of exhaustion). But it didn’t happen. Instead I got caught up in a webpage update for a volunteer group I’m in. The page froze and I had to start from scratch and it took me into the sixth and seventh hours. I knew I’d feel better if I just went for a nice long walk, but I couldn’t justify prying myself away.

So, to try to change this unresourceful habit, I am going to do the following: (Boy, I can hear a chorus in my head of why this isn’t going to work, and I haven’t even written it down yet!)

By 2pm every workday this week I will go to the local wildlife headquarters and hike their mile-long trail. And if I have extra time I will walk the labrynth that is part of the trail. I did this last week and it was absolutely glorious. I thought at the time, “I need to do this every day!” To help me keep to my intention, I promise to post a photo at my site, www.natureobservation.com, of something I noticed on my walk each day. This has the added incentive of helping to get that site off the ground with some content and I get to share my little discoveries. Yay!

The natural world is intricate, mysterious and beautiful; get out there and enjoy it!

It is really important for us to get away from the boxes in our lives (computer screen, television, car windshield, cell phones, etcetera) and out into the stimulating mess of nature. Our brains crave the variety of colors, textures, scents and sounds of the out-of-doors. Not only does being out in nature help to quiet the endless voices in our minds (you know – the ones that constantly list what we’re supposed to be doing right now or how we screwed up or are going to screw up), but the change of scenery and change of pace allows our subconscious to activate and come up with solutions to the puzzles of our daily lives. And it helps soothe our emotional selves.

Give it a try. If nothing else, take a window break – stare out the window and watch something natural for five to ten minutes. Even better, go outside and take a closer look.

Yeah, I’m a Star Trek fan.  Particularly the Voyager series with all of its strong women characters.  “Resistance is futile” is quintessential Borg.  In the TV series, the Borg are a group of organisms that are united in their assimilation by technology.  The technology invades the bodies of unwilling hosts, eventually turning self-directed, intelligent beings into motile pieces of a larger machine intelligence.  The only goal of this machine intelligence is the acquisition and assimilation of more life forms.

I like this analogy for the part of our brain that doesn’t want to stand out from the crowd.  It wants us to act just like everyone else, look like everyone else, BE just like everyone else.  And it is really very good at making us conform to its wishes.

A more common term for what I’m calling Borg is the “lizard brain.”  The lizard brain is an actual part of our brains, one of the oldest parts in terms of evolution and one that we share with all vertebrates, including reptiles.  It consists of the the brain stem, cerebellum, and basal ganglia. Rich Presta describes part of this area in his article, The Evolution of Anxiety: “The amygdala is like a file cabinet of important memories. Not memories such as your favorite guacamole recipe or where you put your car keys, but memories the reptile in you considers important.  You know, stuff that can hurt or kill you.”

Seth Godin in Success Magazine online says, “The lizard brain, that prehistoric brain stem that all of us must contend with, doesn’t like being laughed at.  It’s the part of our brain that worries about safety and dishes out anger. Being laughed at is the lizard brain’s worst nightmare.”

Just like the captain and crew of the Starship Voyager when they are outwitting the Borg, we have to be crafty and diligent in order to overcome our inner Borg.  Sonja Alarr recently posted a video documenting how she overcomes her inner lizard in order to accomplish her goals:

RESURRECTING CREATIVITY from Sonja Alarr on Vimeo.

What tricks do you use to get around your inner lizard?