Last year the woman I ran my first marathon with contracted cancer, and three weeks ago, she passed away. In her honor, I’m running my sixth marathon — back to the one we ran together, the San Diego Rock ‘n’ Roll Marathon, June 3.

Rebecca and me after our first marathon, June 2007

Now, you’d think that after five marathons in five years, I’d be an old pro. Far from it this time, my friends. In the past couple of years, my career and my new marriage have taken precedence over running, and I’m starting with the beginning training schedules again, taking each mile one step at a time in hopes my body will remember that once I was a pretty dedicated runner.

This personal quest, like many before, echoes where I am in my professional life. On August 30 of last year, I wrote that I was shutting the doors of my copywriting business to focus on being an author and speaker. But I jumped off that bridge with something of a safety net — a “part-time,” seasonal position at The Leukemia & Lymphoma Society. I put “part-time” in parentheses because the job turned out to be quite time consuming, and now that it has come to an end (as of Friday of last week), I’m left here on square one with my new business as well.

So as I sit here on the first full day of the first full week without having to juggle the other job, I’m looking for a road map to success. Should I send out emails to anyone and everyone who might hire me as a speaker? Start working on another book? Jump back into social media? Attend a conference for speakers to get back on track? I’m out of shape as a business owner as well, and I have to start with the beginner’s schedule to catch up.

My marathon coaches have a plan to get me back into shape. Each week — each day, even — they spell out exactly what I need to do to cross the finish line in June. But right now I have no such plan for Your Nerdy Best Friend. I think my best bet is to first get caught up on some basic business chores (like accounting and taxes), then take myself away for three or so days to draw my own road map. I’ve done it before, and I can do it again. I just need to remember to take it one step at a time.

So, what’s your Square One story? Are you starting something new in 2012 and floundering about your first steps? Share your challenges, and perhaps we can all help each other.

PS — I’d be honored, truly honored, if you took a moment to read my friend’s story as told by her husband (it will touch your heart, I promise) and to donate any small amount in her honor. If cancer has touched your home, please join me in the fight to stop this dreaded disease from taking more of our friends and family too soon.

This weekend I sent off the final file for the final project for the final client of Avenue Z Writing Solutions. Yep. That’s it. I retired from the copywriting biz to write more books and make a living speaking around the country. Or something. I haven’t really convinced myself that being a full-time author and speaker will pay the bills, but I’m jumping off the cliff to give it a try.

Strangely enough, the move comes almost four years to the day since I quit my sales job in a tearful phone call to my boss. “I can’t do this anymore!” I wailed. And when I got off the phone, I said, “Uh oh. Now what?” I was daunted by the idea of looking for a real job (even before the economy tanked), so I decided the easiest thing to do would be to start my own writing business.

It was very, very tough to make the phone calls to those clients, many of whom I’ve had almost since the beginning. It took me several months to finish all the work in progress, and when I pushed the send button on Sunday, there were a couple of tears.

So, here I am again starting completely from scratch on a new career I know very little about. That’s not exactly true because I’ve been booking speaking gigs for about three years, plus the first book is in the bag (and on the shelf — check it out!). But I have to create new marketing techniques, new online strategies, new connections — really a whole new identity.

So before I begin a new chapter, I thought I’d share a pictorial look back at the last four years of Avenue Z:

Now… on to the future as Your Nerdy Best Friend!

I’m at the airport again, and I’m people watching, as I often do. Among the people traveling alone, see tense faces, frustrated faces, sleepy faces and occasionally someone who looks amused. It seems that when people are concentrating on getting somewhere, their contenace reflects their mood. And more interestingly, if they simply sport a blank face, I seem to interpolate a personality.

Perhaps it’s just me, but my first reaction when I see a particularly downward sloping face is, “That person must be unpleasant to have over for Thanksgiving.” I assume a dour personality, and that’s a shame. Frequently my assumptions have been proven wrong when a
scowling person breaks into an infectious smile and ends up becoming a delightful friend.

Before you stop reading this post because it has nothing to do with success in business, let me link my reflections on expressions to happiness in life. Many years ago I read a study that showed that women in the 1950s who smiled in their yearbook pictures were more likely to have judged their lives as happy. And more recent study showed that the bigger the smile in an adult’s schoolage photo, the less likely that the person had ended a marriage in divorce.

So this tells me that perhaps my assuptions about people based on an unsmiling face may be true. Perhaps they’re harder to get along with, or maybe we assume they’re harder to get along with and don’t like to hang out with them as much.

Either way, this revelation has to have an effect on our business lives. People like to do business with people they like, and if your facial expression makes you less likeable, for whatever reason, perhaps you won’t get ahead like a more pleasant colleague.

Now I wonder how my theory relates to the differences between men and women in business. I’ve written before, as have many, about the fact that aggressive, even unpleasant men in the workplace can get things done and be perceived as leaders, while aggressive women are frequently considered bitchy. Not sure if the facial expression theory works there.

But I’d rather be pleasant than aggressive, and I’d rather wear a smile than a frown. And I’d like people to think I’d be a pleasing addition to a Thanksgiving meal. So I try to consciously relax my face and am ready with a smile in an airport and everywhere else. It’s tougher than I want it to be, and I often catch myself with a downturned mouth. Perhaps it’ll be permanently natural one day.

Look in the mirror one day when you’re just out and about. Would you invite you to Thanksgiving dinner?

It’s Saturday afternoon, and I’m sitting here trying to come up with, for lack of a better word, a bribe. I want to create a cool little freebie that I can offer as an incentive for people (umm — like you guys) to do all the wonderful things that help businesses in today’s world stay solvent:

• Enjoy our blog posts
• Tell your friends about us
• Like our Facebook pages
• Follow us on Twitter
• And, of course, buy our products

Some of you guys have been loyal fans since I started this blog in 2007, and based on other uber-supportive comments you’ve made, I imagine you might say, “Oh, Beth — don’t be silly — just stay sincere and honest and people will follow you.”

In all actuality, that’s the technique that has worked for me so far. But there are a lot of sincere and honest people out there,  creating fabulous products that people will love. The problem is no one knows about us yet, and we have to compete with all the other people with fabulous products for our potential audience’s attention. Thus we have to rely on your word of mouth and a little bit of luck to hope we catch on.

So, I’m coming up with cool freebies and incentives that will perhaps catch your collective eye. It’s a model I understand more than most, since many of the free tools that I discover are actually freebie versions of software and apps that their makers hope you will buy. I’m thinking of the following:

• If you become a fan on the new Facebook page, you get electronic version of a quick reference guide of about 75 of my favorite tools.
• If you pre-order the book on Amazon.com, you get a printed booklet of my editor’s top 10 picks OR a 15-minute one-to-one consultation to help you discover new tools that you need.

Now for your opinion… what do you think about all the techniques companies do to bribe you to pay attention to them? What works? At which techniques do you roll your eyes?