At a charity auction, I was the winning bid for a consultation with a sports nutritionist. My first assignment was to write down everything I ate for several days.

Here was one lunch’s description: “Oh gosh. Horrible lunch. Ate a pork chop about the size of a liver. Plus lots of spinach. I was so hungry!” One afternoon I wrote: “I give up! Been craving good sweets all week. Broke down and ate Now & Laters — 240 calories.”

I sent her the diary with a note. “Please don’t judge me.” I KNEW she’d come back and say, “Woman, you suck. You eat all day every day. Your problem is that you need to stop eating. Duh.”

But her actual response blew me away. “You are definitely not eating enough,” she wrote. “I need to explain the function of eating at the right time so that your body does not slow your metabolism down thinking it won’t get any food.”

Whoa! That was the last response I expected. I thought I had this nutrition stuff all figured out, until an expert gave me some real advice.

I think that’s a danger we all face when it comes to our businesses and careers. We think we have marketing figured out. Or we decide we’ve heard it all when it comes to getting organized. So we just play those soundtracks in our head without consulting with others who may have more expertise. Or we look at a list of ideas from an expert and say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah. Got it. Heard it.” And then we don’t implement the suggestions, even though we know they would help.

I eavesdropped on a conversation about resume writing the other day. One man was asking for resume samples because he didn’t want to pay $400 for a resume rewrite. Someone wrote back with a recommendation that the guy spend more, much more, to hire a career coach who would provide resume drafting advice and assistance, recommendations for cover letters, networking strategies and one-on-one consulting. “You may ask, ‘In these tough times can I afford spend that kind of money?’ With unemployment at a 16-year high and getting worse before it gets better, you may want to ask if you can afford not to. A colleague of mine, who holds an MBA from the Kellogg School and a JD from Stanford, has been resisting hiring a career coach for a year now. How much do you think that has cost her?”

What other areas do you think we’re in danger of shutting out sound advice because we know it all?

My brilliant friend Charlie Fern tagged me for a very popular meme: 7 things you didn’t know about me.

Frankly, I can’t believe there are really 7 things you don’t know about me if you’ve been reading for a while. I get pimples. I’ve never acquired the habit of brushing my teeth before I go to bed. I wear weird clothes while working at home, eat bizarre food and have an obsession with cupcakes, which I can’t eat because of my obsession with running.  I’ve even shown you what I keep on my desk and in my fridge.

Oh, I even told you I was the sexiest woman on the planet. Actually, Google (at least searching from this computer) tells me that I’m second, just behind Scarlett Johansson. Not kidding. Try it!

So, Charlie told me I needed to tell you 7 things that you didn’t know. I decided to modify the meme to tell you 7 green-ish things you didn’t know about me. (Please keep in mind that this doesn’t include my horrible non-green secrets. I’m sitting here with a disposable paper cup of coffee. I should be shot.)

1. Green coffee
   My sister and I both add our creamer first before the coffee so we don’t have to waste a spoon to stir. If someone else has poured the coffee for us, we blow on the top to mix the coffee with wind power. Also, when necessary, I hunt for the broken stirrers in coffeeshops to make sure they aren’t thrown away, and sometimes I touch a lot of clean stirrers to get to the broken ones. I’m sorry about that. I also recycle my sweetener packet* paper.
2. Green laundry
   Since I don’t get very dirty sitting at this computer all day, I wear the same clothes for several days in a row. I don’t do the same with workout clothes. That would be too much, even for me.
3. Compost
   I ADORE composting. One of the reasons I was so enamored with my boyfriend D.J. right from the start is that he not only recycled… he composted! I save every scrap I can in a container in my fridge, and I take it to him. We broke up last year for about a month, and I was left with compost in the fridge. This made me so sad. When we got back together, I refused to start another compost container until I knew it was going to last. Now when I hand him the compost, he says, “Woohoo! I’m in!”
4. Green roots
   At the University of North Texas in the late ’80s, I’m proud to say I was on the first recycling committee. I even requested that our newspaper stop producing so many copies since so many were left each day. This decreased our advertising power. But they did it anyway.
5. Litter
   I try to pick up litter if it’s in my path, but I have one really, really strict rule: If I actually TOUCH the litter, I am 100 percent obligated to find a trash can. If I touch it then drop it again, I am the horrible litterbug.
6. Green judging
   Ohh, I’m a horrible person. If I go to your house and you don’t recycle, I judge you. I can barely date a man who doesn’t make that a priority (but I have — one must make hay while the sun shines). I even have trouble keeping my mouth shut when I visit client offices. I ask politely, “Do you recycle?” If they say, “No, just toss it,” I can hardly stand it. Recycling is SO easy, people. A little effort, please?
7. Reusing bags
   Again, I’m dreadful. I’m too impulsive a shopper, and I ALWAYS forget my reusable bags when I go shopping. So I ask for paper and use the paper bags to collect the recycling around the house (I keep a bag in every room to make sure I don’t get lazy). If it’s just a few items, I carry them out. The other day I used my chin to hold a 1-foot stack of cat food while I held a box of hair color* in one hand and a half gallon of soy milk in the other. I don’t recommend it.

Now I’m supposed to tag 7 more people to write 7 things on their blogs, but you’ll feel guilty if you don’t do it. Instead, add your green things below. What little green (or non-green) quirks do you have? I’ll try not to judge, and maybe we’ll all get some great new ideas on how to do something little that adds up to something big.

* I know I’m not supposed to use hair dye or consume artificial sweeteners. Bad for the environment and bad for me. But I’d be a fat chick with gray hair if I didn’t, and I prefer to remain the sexiest woman on the planet. I’m sure you understand.

By Guest Blogger Mary from Simply Forties

I am honored to have been asked by Beth to be her second guest poster.   She gave me carte blanche as to subject and length of post.  What power!  It’s been a pleasure.

I was watching Bill Nye’s program, Stuff Happens, on Planet Green the other day.  He did a segment on cashmere.  Cashmere, as I’m sure you know, is a completely natural fiber obtained from the Cashmere goat.  Cashmere goats are not sheared like a sheep, they molt or shed their winter coats in the Spring and the fibers are collected or, in some cases, combed out.  What could be more natural, more green, more eco-friendly than that?

If you’ve ever had a cashmere sweater or scarf or robe, you know why everyone loves cashmere.  Therein lies the rub.  Everyone loves cashmere!  As a result of the popularity of cashmere, the Cashmere goat raisers, who run their charges on the outskirts of the Gobi, are expanding their flocks at a rapid rate.  Goats are voracious eaters and efficient brush clearers. Since goats like to eat from the top down, areas where goats forage will have a “browse line” below which virtually everything is cleared off.  The grasslands that border the Gobi are being stripped away, allowing the desert to expand by leaps and bounds.  Maybe cashmere is not so green after all.

So let’s see.  Cotton, a renewable natural fiber, is grown on plants that are sprayed with pesticides.  They grow a lot of cotton around here, in this desert, and I can tell you that the fields are heavily irrigated and, after the harvest, stripped and left bare for the soil to blow away during the windy season.  That doesn’t seem so green either.  Wool comes from sheep, which means it is also a renewable fiber.  Sheep, like cows, emit an appreciable amount of methane gas every day.  Methane is a particularly worrisome greenhouse gas.  Producing wool also requires a vast amount of water—not only to raise and care for the sheep, but also to rid the raw wool of numerous impurities. It takes approximately 500,000 liters of water to manufacture a metric ton of wool; this figure is even higher when the sheep in question are fed in confined quarters, where extra water is required to manage the manure.

I remember a few years ago when it seemed like every other news report was of yet another food that was going to give us cancer.  When it was just a few, we were able to make good choices and avoid the ones that were reported to be cancer-causing.  Then it began to seem as though all foods were problematic; the water we drank was dangerous; even the air we breathed.  The result?  I know I threw up my hands and said there were no good choices.  I gave up and ate what I wanted.  I’m sure I was not alone in feeling helpless about what to do.

While we all want to make informed, environmentally friendly choices, I’m afraid this “under the microscope” look at all aspects of the production of the products we use every day is going to lead us to decide that we can make no completely responsible choices.  We may stop trying.  I don’t know what the answer is in this world of information overload.  In fact I like having a lot of information at my fingertips.  I’m just not so sure this is going in the right direction.  As we become more and more concerned about the environmental impact of everything we do, which is a good thing, I’m afraid we may become overwhelmed and give up.

What about you?  Are you starting to feel a bit overwhelmed and unsure about your choices?  I know I am.

Hi!  I’m Mary from Simply Forties,  a 47-year old single mother of a college-aged son.  I write about the topics that interest me most as I make my way through my forties – finances, the environment, social responsibility and, sometimes, relationships and dealing with grown children. I hope you’ll stop by my blog and look around.  You can also find me every other Thursday over at 5 Minutes for Going Green.

The best idea in the universe came to me on a Saturday afternoon this past July. I was sitting here at the computer, working on my monthly newsletter (which goes out about every 45 days), when I had a marketing brainstorm that almost knocked me out of my chair.

M&Ms! Customized M&Ms! I would put my cartoon head on candy and put it in a cute tin and add a raffia bow with a little handmade card! Yeah… and I would send it to people. Lots of people. And I would write a clever note like, “Well, I wouldn’t call this a bribe, exactly, but….”

Yeah! What a brilliant marketing idea to get me noticed! As I struggled to make sure my face on the M&M would not make my cheeks look more pudgy, I located and ordered the cute little tins with the clear tops so people could immediately see the custom M&Ms.

I was so excited when the tins arrived that I opened them in the post office.

Then I put them in the trunk.

And there they stayed.

Last week — last week – I removed the box from the trunk of my Miata. I never did order the M&Ms. The box took up about a third of the trunk, and since July each time I popped it open for groceries, I felt THE GUILT. Oof, that project. Yeah. Should have followed through. That’s a lot of guilt.

The reasons I didn’t finish the job (too expensive, not clear to whom I should send them, scared of having people eat my heads) don’t matter as much in this post as THE GUILT about not finishing. As small business owners, we have plenty to worry about. Will the check make it into the bank before the rent comes out? Did I save enough for taxes? Am I going to make the deadline? Did I meet the client’s expectations?

Adding guilt about unfinished projects is a complete waste of time. But we do it all the time. We have these great ideas that we can’t get around to, and we feel frustrated or guilty when we think of them. “Ugh — yeah… we really need to do that still.” We think we don’t have the time to get them done, but we waste the energy feeling guilty about not getting them done.

One of my favorite productivity gurus is Troy Malone from Pelotonics (a group productivity website). Troy has embraced David Allen’s Getting Things Done, and Troy tells me that David tells him that THE GUILT keeps us from being productive. Instead of having these little niggling unfinished tasks in our head, we need to create a plan to get them done or to forget about them or to hand them off to someone else. The more little feelings of guilt we have about things left undone, the less we can manage the tasks we have in front of us.

So, I’m going to stop beating myself up over not making the M&Ms with my cartoon on them. It’s still a brilliant idea, of course, and perhaps the perfect opportunity will come up. But I’m going to stop feeling guilty. I’m also going to stop worrying about the bag full of picture frames I bought to create the perfect white board for my to do lists (no, really — this was a great idea!). And I’m going to hide the blank digital picture frame where I never uploaded my nephews’ pictures, and the empty organizer where I never filed my 2008 tax receipts. These things don’t really matter here at Avenue Z, and I’m tired of wasting time worrying about them.

Happy New Year.