Oh boy has it been crazy here on Avenue Z. I’m finishing up a new site (www.askbethz.com), getting ready to release the book (should be out in late May, but you can preorder here ), settling into married life, coaching a running team… Today I’m flying to Houston for my first speaking gig with a book signing, and I had to call the airlines to make sure I’d have wifi so I can get a project finished on the way there.

Crazy busy, I tell you!

But as I sift through my emails from the past couple of months, it looks like “crazy busy” is a new normal in our business world:

• “Sorry it took me so long to respond… things are crazy busy!”
• “I wanted to get to this last week, but it’s been nuts!”
• “Thanks for your patience… It’s just nonstop around here these days!”

And on and on. When I was growing up, I don’t remember my parents coming home and saying, “Wow, kids. Sorry we haven’t been home for dinner much — it’s crazy busy at work.” Both parents came home at fairly normal times, ate dinner with us most nights and retired to the TV room with us to watch awesome ’80s tv (Taxi, Love Boat, One Day at a Time, anyone?).

Are these “crazy busy” times a new phenomenon? Have we created work environments with deadlines at such an impossible pace that we’re all going insane? And has technology — the tools that are supposed to make our lives easier — played a role in causing this chaos?

I would answer in the affirmative for all three of those questions. I think the easier we have made it to access work, information, entertainment and connections, the tougher we have made our workloads. As much as I love technology and the excitement of this world we live in, I’d love it if we stopped answering the “How are you?” question with “Crazy busy!”

So, how do you answer “How are you?” Is your life calm, cool and collected these days, or are you crazy busy, too?

Gotta run… My Roomba robot vacuum just got stuck under the couch, my iPhone needs charging and I have to pack my Garmin Forerunner so I can go for a run in Houston.

My friend Sam dropped me a quick note on Facebook this morning: “How did it go?”

I read the question via email without logging into Facebook. Immediately I assumed that the “it” she was referring to was my run last night, which, quite frankly, was pretty pathetic. Four miles total, but at least a mile of that was walking. Damn plantar fasciitis! It was so pathetic that I whined last night to D.J. that perhaps I wasn’t assistant coach material for my upcoming marathon season, where I’m supposed to help 40-60 people get to the finish line in a marathon or half marathon. Perhaps I should drop out because I was completely out of shape and plagued by nagging injuries. Oh, poor me.

But the ever level-headed D.J. kinda scoffed at my self pity. “Babe,” he said, “today you had a fabulous presentation where everybody loved you, and now you’re all down about your running instead of thinking about the great career win you had today. Come on!”

Deej had a great point. I completely rocked a speaking gig yesterday. In fact, the speaker who was scheduled after me delayed her presentation because she ran over to hand me her card and ask me if I could come to speak to her group. It was a win all around. And the run last night was not as bad as I was making it out to be either. I was out there, after all, making the effort to work through a rough patch. And I have several weeks before the coaching season begins — plenty of time to get back to regular running form.

Yet this morning my first thought with Sam’s email was about yesterday’s down moment, not my high. The two events yesterday were completely independent of one another, yet my focus was on the mediocre run.

I think learning how to focus on the positive takes conscious practice. I think I have to learn to recognize that I’m giving energy to the negative and forgetting the positive. And I’m going to put some effort toward that to see how much more positive each day can be.

Your turn… what do you dwell on when you have a good/bad day? When you receive feedback about something from ten people, and nine of them love it and one person hates it, do you spend your energy celebrating the nine or obsessing over the one?

PS… To write this blog post I logged into Facebook to get Sam’s actual words. Turns out she was asking a mutual friend how her eyelash-dying appointment went. It wasn’t about me after all….

Ever feel like your life will *really* get started if X happens? For me the X factor is the purchase of an area rug.

Let me explain. A couple of months ago I decided to give up my ocean-view office to move my headquarters into the house. Originally I had moved into a real office to increase my productivity. The off-site office worked wonderfully for a while until I figured out how to find as many distractions there as I did at home. So I decided to save myself a few hundred dollars a month and revamp my home office.

Our poor home office has undergone several changes in the last few years. When I moved in to D.J.’s house, he let me take it over, and I rearranged his big, wooden lawyer furniture to give it a little softer look. Then when I moved out, we moved in a twin bed for a while to accommodate extra company. Then D.J. sold his practice to a larger firm and took the office back over. But he didn’t really use it, so here I am again.

I have big dreams for this room that I sit in for 8-10 hours a day. I have a glorious blank wall to play with, and an unlimited imagination about things I can do. But so far all I’ve done is move one of the big, heavy desks to another side of the room and put up some gauzy orange curtains I’ve had for years.

In my mind, all I need to really make this room into *my* office is to find the perfect area rug. Something bright and cheery with flowers, or maybe a coffee cup, or perhaps even a cupcake! Yes! And once I find this rug, it’ll help me decorate the big, blank wall. It’ll help me determine what cute desk accessories would look best. It’ll make me feel at home.

So sometimes I get lost rug shopping. I can easily spend an hour or two searching Overstock.com or craigslist. I just get obsessed about finding THE PERFECT RUG that will ignite the completion of the office. Sometimes I find a rug that will probably do… but then I dismiss it because it has one too many flowers, or I flinch at the price (a perfect rug should cost about $25, right? Sigh). So I never buy my rug, and I sit in this office that I don’t consider fully formed.

To me this is a metaphor for other decisions in our lives. How many times have you told yourself that as soon as you lose a little weight you’ll really go out there and meet someone new? Or maybe you think all you need is to take the time to REALLY write a good resume, and then you’ll go after that great job. We sit around waiting for some little thing to happen to transform our lives (or our offices) into something more than it is. And in the meantime, life (and work) keep happening.

I know I’m not the first one to write on this subject — probably not even the one millionth one — but I think I need to look around me and accept this office as my own and get on with my life/career.

So, what’s your area rug?

This week I’m speaking at the California Society for Association Executives in beautiful Monterey. I’m trying out my new business cards, which are bright, sleek mini cards that point people to the new site, AskBethZ.com. This event is more or less my coming out party for the author/speaker path I’ve been wanting to take, a diversion from the freelance writer/marketing consultant road I’ve been on for almost three years.

Last night I ran into a speaking guru and personal brand expert, who asked me what I did. I froze. Speakers are obliged to be able to spout their conversation-provoking “brand promise” or tagline or elevator speech in a nanosecond — confidently and with conviction. It’s a thing, and I don’t have that thing.

So I stuttered and said, “Oh, I don’t have my little speech down yet, but let me give you my card.” So I got out my cute little cards that had been impressing people all day. I was hoping he’d love how adorable and colorful they were and would see how I was positioning myself. He said, “You certainly need to work on your brand promise.”

Sigh. Deflate.

And then there was a wonderful coincidence — this guy is actually a brand promise coach for speakers and authors! And he could help me hone my brand promise with one-on-one consultations! My… I am a lucky girl to have found such expertise at a time when I need it so much.

All sarcasm aside, though, he’s right. My tagline — Beth Ziesenis, The Quick Tech Trainer — was a suggestion by another speaker during a 5-minute breakfast conversation at another conference. My first draft was something like, “Hi, I’m Beth Ziesenis, and it really makes me happy to help people.” That wasn’t quite catchy enough. For a while I’ve gone with themes around me being “The Cheapskate Freelancer,” but speaker coaches and marketing gurus really, really hate the whole “cheap” theme.

Is it just me, or is it almost impossible to be your own marketing analyst to elevate your business? I spend so much time answering emails, writing for clients, sending bios to meeting coordinators and making travel reservations that I feel like I never have time to really think about my own messaging. And when I do come up with an idea, it’s tough to find people to bounce it off of because I work alone and don’t have much of a community around me.

What I need is a me — an outside consultant who can take an objective look at what I want to do and help me figure out how to say it. Any volunteers?

This week several people at the conference came up and said, “I used to keep up with you via your blog — aren’t you writing anymore?” Thanks for the encouragement to get back to the blog, and thanks to the guru for giving me an ego-bruising encounter as a writing prompt.